Re: Use of AI for process scheduling

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 21:28, Timothy Miller wrote:
> 
> 
>>Basically, we need to write and install into the kernel an AI engine
>>which uses user feedback about the "feel" of the system to adjust
>>heuristics dynamically.  For instance, if the user sees that the system
>>is misbehaving, they can pause the system in the kernel debugger,
>>examine process priorities, and indicate what "outputs" from the AI
>>engine are wrong.  It then learns from that.  Heuristics can be tweaked
>>until things run as desired.  At that point, scheduler developers trade
>>emails in the AI heuristic language.
> 
> 
> I'm no kernel expert but I think that doing what you suggest would take
> an enormous amount of time and resources to do. Also, the scheduler must
> be a real-time piece of software, and needs to take decisions as fast
> and as accurately as possible. I think that implementing an IA-like
> engine would take an great deal of resources. By the time the IA-like
> scheduler has taken its decision, the whole world could have changed
> since.

The AI scheduler is only used for _development_.

For deployment, the rules learned from the AI scheduler are converted to 
C code (or compiled directly to machine language) and used in real-time. 
  I don't expect the rules to be so complex that the C version would use 
much more CPU than the current interactive schedulers being worked on by 
Con, Ingo, and Nick.

During development, the AI scheduler would be used in real-time, and 
that would have a significant effect on the performance of the system. 
But since it's a constant, the relative interactive behavior should be 
about the same between AI and deployed versions, even though the AI 
version uses a lot more CPU time in the kernel.  That is, if the system 
works well with the AI scheduler, it'll work even BETTER with the 
compiled version.