Re: RSDL v0.31

[Al Boldi]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I was very happy to see the "try this patch" email from Al Boldi - not
> because I think that patch per se was necessarily the right fix (I have no
> idea), 

Well, it wasn't really meant as a fix, but rather to point out that 
interactivity boosting is possible with RSDL.

It probably needs a lot more work, but just this one-liner gives an 
unbelievable ia boost.

> but simply because I think that's the kind of mindset we need to have.

Thanks.

> Not a lot of people really *like* the old scheduler, but it's been tweaked
> over the years to try to avoid some nasty behaviour. I'm really hoping
> that RSDL would be a lot better (and by all accounts it has the potential
> for that), but I think it's totally naïve to expect that it won't need
> some tweaking too.

Aside from ia boosting, I think fixed latencies per nice levels may be 
desirable, when physically possible, to allow for more deterministic 
scheduling.

> So I'll happily still merge RSDL right after 2.6.21 (and it won't even be
> a config option - if we want to make it good, we need to make sure
> *everybody* tests it), but what I want to see is that "can do" spirit wrt
> tweaking for issues that come up.
>
> Because let's face it - nothing is ever perfect. Even a really nice
> conceptual idea always ends up hitting the "but in real life, things are
> ugly and complex, and we've depended on behaviour X in the past and can't
> change it, so we need some tweaking for problem Y".
>
> And everything is totally fixable - at least as long as people are willing
> to!

Agreed.


Thanks!

--
Al

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/