On Monday 05 March 2007 00:25, Gene Heskett wrote:
Great, thanks.
Just to make it clear. The purpose of this scheduler is at all costs to
maintain absolute fairness no matter what type of load it is put under. This
means that if you heavily load up your machine without the use of 'nice' then
your interactive tasks _will_ slow down proportionately to the amount of cpu
you use. So doing make -j4 for example will make any other task started in
taht presence run precisely 1/5th speed, but they will still be responsive,
have low latency (and audio shouldn't skip for example).
There will be times when the mainline scheduler feels more interactive than
this scheduler, and that is because it has significant unfairness granted
towards interactive tasks. This degree of unfairness in an effort to maintain
interactivity has been criticised and causes problems in certain environments
with both loss of fairness, relative starvation and is not entirely
predictable.
This was designed to be robust for any application since linux demands a
general purpose scheduler design, while preserving interactivity, instead of
optimising for one particular end use.
--
-ck
-
