Scheduler smoothness and fairness - results and package

Scheduler smoothness and fairness - results and package

[Bill Davidsen]

Thanks to the suggestions of several people and some encouragement, I've 
done another upgrade of the schedular characteristic package glitch1. 
For "bottom line" folks, the results are at
	http://www.tmr.com/~davidsen/sched_smooth_03.html

This package runs four fast scrolling xterms and a copy of glxgears to 
produce both screen update and CPU load. In addition to the human 
observation of smoothness, the glxgears speeds are characterized by 
variance from sample to sample, and the number of random numbers 
generated by the xterm programs are also characterized.

Changes:

- Reruns for a given configuration are shown in a single row.
- The analysis has had minor output format and statistical tweaks for 
correctness as well as handling of multiple run output in a single row.
- the glxgears 1st value is shown as a separate item, since there is a 
large stoppage on the first sample after cold boot with some schedulers.

The full source and doc is now available from
	http://www.tmr.com/~public/source/
so people can do their own runs. Note that values between different 
machines are almost certainly not meaningful.

Having run all this on a dual core Core2duo in x86 (32 bit) mode, I'm 
now off to rerun in x86_64 mode, and on a single CPU hyperthreaded 
machine, and a pure uniprocessor. I'm going to create a page for all the 
results in one place for anyone who cares.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot