Re: Trying out SCHED_BATCH

[Peter Williams <pwil3058@bigpond.net.au>]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
>> Paolo Ciarrocchi <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Andrew, what's your plan for the staircase scheduler ?
>>
>>
>>
>> I have none, frankly.  I haven't seen any complaints about the current
>> scheduler.
>>
>> If someone can identify bad behaviour in the current scheduler which
>> staircase improves then please describe a tescase which the scheduler
>> developers can use to reproduce the situation.
> 
> 
> Of course that may result in just another band-aid on the current 
> scheduler rather than a change.
> 
>>
>> If, after that, we deem that the problem cannot be feasibly fixed 
>> within the
>> context of the current scheduler and that the problem is sufficiently
>> serious to justify wholesale replacement of the scheduler then sure,
>> staircase is an option.
> 
> 
> More to the point, was there a problem with plugable schedulers? It 
> would be both technically and politically better to let people try, use, 
> and write schedulers for special case loads, just as we have for io 
> scheduling.
> 
> I didn't find staircase to be the solution to any of my problems, but it 
> would be nice to let all the people who are improving schedulers have an 
> easy way to try new ideas (easier than building a whole new kernel, that 
> is).
> 

At Con's request I've taken over responsibility for plugsched but I've 
been away visiting relatives for the last week or so and, therefore, I'm 
a little behind.  I hope to release a plugsched patch for 2.6.10 in the 
next few days with a (work in progress) modification to share a lot more 
code between schedulers so that the amount of work required to implement 
new schedulers is reduced.

Peter
-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@bigpond.net.au

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
  -- Ambrose Bierce