From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269695AbTGJXYY (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 19:24:24 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269699AbTGJXYY (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 19:24:24 -0400 Received: from air-2.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:46009 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S269695AbTGJXXY (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 Jul 2003 19:23:24 -0400 Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:38:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Felipe Alfaro Solana cc: Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Linux 2.5.75 In-Reply-To: <1057879835.584.7.camel@teapot.felipe-alfaro.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 11 Jul 2003, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote: > > Is there any expected or planned timeframe to finalize the pre-2.6 > series and end up with a stable 2.6.0 kernel? It's a bit hard to plan, since it depends on just how well the pre-series ends up working for people. There are now people starting to use the current 2.5.x kernels for production use, and indicators look pretty good in general, but who can tell? So if I were to guess at a couple of months, then that's still just a guess. > I'm worried about the current status of the 2.5 kernel scheduler. I know > that Con is working hard to nail down all the problems that some people > like me are having. I don't still feel comfortable with it, and although > Con patches are several orders of magnitude better than stock scheduler, > there are minor problems. Quite frankly, I worry a lot more about device drivers etc than I do about the scheduler. We'll never have "The Perfect Scheduler" (tm), since I don't think such a thing exists, but more importantly, I could live even with the current one, and I'm sure Con's will be better without having any huge stability issues. > Sometime ago, I made down a combo patch and, sincerely, it's the one I'm > using the most for my desktop boxes as it's the one that gets better > response times and interactive feeling. For my server boxes, neither my > combo patch, neither Con or stock do feel good when the system is under > heavy load. It suffers from starvation. Simply doing a "tar jxvf" makes > logging into the system a PITA. And this one is almost certainly not a process scheduler issue, but an IO scheduler one. 2.5.75 may help that a bit - anticipatory IO scheduling from the -mm tree, and a much simpler (and in my tests, noticeably faster and more robust) executable mmap prefetcher. But as with process scheduling, I don't believe in "perfect". It will just have to be "good enough for a lot of people". Linus