On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Al Boldi wrote:Have you noticed that currently that is exactly what happens? If the default scheduler doesn't handle your load well you have the option of rewriting it and maintaining it, or doing without, or tying to fix your case without breaking others, or patching in some other, non-mainline, scheduler.
My preferred sphere of operation is the Manichean domain of faster vs.
slower, functionality vs. non-functionality, and the like. For me, such
design concerns are like the need for a kernel to format pagetables so
the x86 MMU decodes what was intended, or for a compiler to emit valid
assembly instructions, or for a programmer to write C the compiler
won't reject with parse errors.
Sure, but I think, even from a technical point of view, competition is a good
thing to have. Pluggable schedulers give us this kind of competition, that
forces each scheduler to refine or become obsolete. Think evolution.
The point Linus is makeing is that with pluggable schedulers there isn't competition between them, the various developer teams would go off in their own direction and any drawbacks to their scheduler could be answered with "that's not what we are good at, use a different scheduler", with the very real possibility that a person could get this answer from ALL schedulers, leaving them with nothing good to use.