Hi all
I've just installed 2.5.64-mm6, and I've tried out the new improved
scheduler and it's definately not there yet. I can easily cause ogg
playback to skip (for example) by changing virtual desktop in windowmaker
to busy konqueror window. X is not reniced (has a nice level of 0)
It's several months since I last ran a 2.4 kernel on this machine, but as I
remember it did not skip when changing desktops.
My experience suggests that skips occur when more than one interactive task
starts to become a CPU hog, for example X and konqueror can be idle for
long periods, and so become interactive, but during an intensive redraw
they briefly behave as CPU hogs but maintain their interactive bonus this
means that ogg123 has to wait until the hogs complete their timeslice
before being scheduled.
My test case tries to reproduce this by creating a number of tasks which
alternate between being 'interactive' and CPU hogs. On my Celery 333 laptop
it can sometimes cause skips with only 1 child, and is pretty much
guaranteed to cause skips with more child tasks.
To compile use 'gcc -o thud thud.c'
To reproduce, I:
run ogg123 somefile.ogg in one xterm
run ./thud 1 in another xterm
The music will often skip shortly after thud displays "running....". If not,
try ./thud 2 or more.
My setup is celery 333 Sony Vaio 128MB, Debian sid, XFree86 4.2.1, gcc 3.2,
preempt. (Side note: the PCMCIA changes in 2.5.64-mm6 seem to work OK with
3c574_cs)
Charlie
=============================================
/* thud.c */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <sched.h>
/* These are used as strings so that strcmp can be used as a delay loop */
char *s1, *s2;
/* 20000 is fine on my 333MHz Celeron. Adjust so that system time is not
excessive */
#define DELAY 20000
void busy_wait(long sec, long usec)
{
struct timeval tv;
long long end_usec;
gettimeofday(&tv,0);
end_usec=(long long)(sec+tv.tv_sec)*1000000 + tv.tv_usec+usec;
while (((long long)tv.tv_sec*1000000 + tv.tv_usec) < end_usec)
{
gettimeofday(&tv,0);
strcmp(s1,s2); /* yuck */
}
}
int main(int argc, char**argv)
{
struct timespec st={10,50000000};
int n=DELAY;
int parent=1;
if (argc<2) {fprintf(stderr,"Syntax: thud <children>\n"); return 0; }
s1=malloc(n);
s2=malloc(n);
memset(s1,33,n);
memset(s2,33,n);
s1[n-1]=0;
s2[n-1]=0;
n=atoi(argv[1]);
fprintf(stderr,"starting %d children\n",n);
for (; n>0; n--)
if (fork()==0) { sched_yield(); parent=0; break; }
while (1)
{
nanosleep(&st, 0);
if (parent) printf("running...");
if (parent) fflush(stdout);
busy_wait(6,0);
if (parent) printf("done\n");
}
return 0;
}
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 15 2003 - 22:00:36 EST