Re: CFS review

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Wed Aug 29 2007 - 09:11:24 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote:

There is another way to show the problem visually under X (vesa-driver), by starting 3 gears simultaneously, which after laying them out side-by-side need some settling time before smoothing out. Without __update_curr it's absolutely smooth from the start.
I posted a LOT of stuff using the glitch1 script, and finally found a set of tuning values which make the test script run smooth. See back posts, I don't have them here.

but you have real 3D hw and DRI enabled, correct? In that case X uses up almost no CPU time and glxgears makes most of the processing. That is quite different from the above software-rendering case, where X spends most of the CPU time.

No, my test machine for that is a compile server, and uses the built-in motherboard graphics which are very limited. This is not in any sense a graphics powerhouse, it is used to build custom kernels and applications, and for testing of kvm and xen, and I grabbed it because it had the only Core2 CPU I could reboot to try new kernel versions and "from cold boot" testing, discovered the graphics smoothness issue by having several windows open on compiles, and developed the glitch1 script as a way to reproduce it.

The settings I used, features=14, granularity=500000, work to improve smoothness on other machines for other uses, but they do seem to impact performance for compiles, video processing, etc, so they are not optimal for general use. I regard the existence of these tuning knobs as one of the real strengths of CFS, when you change the tuning it has a visible effect.

--
bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979

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