From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S272069AbTHNAWa (ORCPT ); Wed, 13 Aug 2003 20:22:30 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S272072AbTHNAWa (ORCPT ); Wed, 13 Aug 2003 20:22:30 -0400 Received: from dsl092-053-140.phl1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([66.92.53.140]:39334 "EHLO grelber.thyrsus.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S272069AbTHNAWX (ORCPT ); Wed, 13 Aug 2003 20:22:23 -0400 From: Rob Landley Reply-To: rob@landley.net To: George Anzinger Subject: Re: Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivas 2.6 scheduler patches Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 20:24:36 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.5 Cc: LKML References: <1059211833.576.13.camel@teapot.felipe-alfaro.com> <3F32C752.4000403@wmich.edu> <3F355F12.4040609@mvista.com> In-Reply-To: <3F355F12.4040609@mvista.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200308132024.36967.rob@landley.net> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Saturday 09 August 2003 16:52, George Anzinger wrote: > Ed Sweetman wrote: > > the problem is you want a process that works like it was run on a single > > tasking OS on an operating system that is built from the ground up to be > > a multi-user multi-tasking OS Considering the multi-tasking OS has 1000 times the CPU power, memory, and disk space as the single-tasking OS did when it debuted, yet still loses to it in some areas, isn't it at least worth looking at? > > and you want both to work perfectly at peak performance We're pondering various heuristics with which to to improve the situation and you say we're persuing perfection. From heuristics. Do you say these sort of things to the virtual memory people? (Since you can't do it perfectly, why bother to swap at all? The perfect being the enemy of the good, and all that.) > > and you want it to know when you want which to work at > > peak performance automatically. I know for a fact that automatic determination of interactivity is possible. In OS/2 you could speed up a compile by moving the mouse pointer over its window repeatedly to give it extra clock ticks. (So far we've managed to avoid anything quite so disgusting in Linux, but there exist OSes where it was done. Having the keyboard and mouse and display be local devices is actually the common case. It took X about ten years to finally start optimizing for the common case on the output side with MIT shared memory extensions and such...) The scheduler actually has a lot of information to work with. Ingo's patches strive to give it more information, and and Con's patches make much better use of that information. This is a good thing. > Well said :) Actually, I didn't really consider that list of straw man arguments to be worth commenting on the first time around. (I thought he was being sarcastic...) Rob