On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 12:58:01PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
SGI machines had an interactive term in their scheduler as well as a
traditional nice priority. It might be useful for Con to possibly consider
this as an extension for problematic (badly hacked) processes like X.
Nice as a control mechanism is rather coarse, yet overly strict because of
the sophistication of his scheduler. Having an additional term (control knob)
would be nice for a scheduler that is built upon (correct me if I'm wrong Con):
1) has rudimentary bandwidth control for a group of runnable processes
2) has a basic deadline mechanism
The "nice" term is only an indirect way of controlling his scheduler and
think and this kind of imprecise tweeking being done with various apps is an
indicator of how lacking it is as a control term in the scheduler. It would
be good to have some kind of coherent and direct control over the knobs that
are (1) and (2).
Schedulers like this have superior control over these properties and they
should be fully exploited with terms in additional to "nice".
Item (1) is subject to a static "weight" multiplication in relation to other
runnable tasks. It also might be useful to make a part of that term a bit
dynamic to get some kind of interactivity control back. It's a matter of
testing, tweeking, etc... and are not easy for apps that don't have a
direct thread context to control like a thread unaware X system.
I hope this was useful.
bill
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