Re: [2.4.17/18pre] VM and swap - it's really unusable

J.A. Magallon
2002-01-13T01:52:43Z

On 20020112 Andrew Morton wrote:
>Ed Sweetman wrote:
>>
>> If you want to test the preempt kernel you're going to need something that
>> can find the mean latancy or "time to action" for a particular program or
>> all programs being run at the time and then run multiple programs that you
>> would find on various peoples' systems. That is the "feel" people talk
>> about when they praise the preempt patch.
>
>Right. And that is precisely why I created the "mini-ll" patch. To
>give the improved "feel" in a way which is acceptable for merging into
>the 2.4 kernel.
>
>And guess what? Nobody has tested the damn thing, so it's going
>nowhere.
>

I have been running mini-ll on -pre3 for a time. And have just booted pre3
with full-ll. I see no marvelous diff between them, but I am not pushing
my box to their knees.
I can get numbers for you, but is there any test out there that gives them ?
Something like 'under this damned test your system just delayed as much as xxx us'.
That kind of 'my xmms does not skip' does not look like a very serious measure.

And could you tell me if some of this patches can interfere with results ?
This is what I am running just now:
- 2.4.18-pre3
- vm fixes from aa (vm-22, vm-raend, truncate-garbage)
- ext3-0.9.17 update
- ide-20011210 (hint: plz, make it in mainline for the time of .18...)
- irqrate-A1
- interrupts-seq-file
- spinlock-cacheline + fast-pte from -aa
- scalable timers
- sensors-cvs
- bproc 3.1.5

On that i have run full-ll+ll_fixes (from -aa) or mini-ll+ll_fixes.

(If someone is interested, patches are at
http://giga.cps.unizar.es/~magallon/linux/ )

TIA.

--
J.A. Magallon # Let the source be with you...
mailto:jamagallon@able.es
Mandrake Linux release 8.2 (Cooker) for i586
Linux werewolf 2.4.18-pre3-beo #5 SMP Sun Jan 13 02:14:04 CET 2002 i686