Ingo,

Volanomark slows by 80% with CFS scheduler on 2.6.23-rc1.  
Benchmark was run on a 2 socket Core2 machine.

The change in scheduler treatment of sched_yield 
could play a part in changing Volanomark behavior.
In CFS, sched_yield is implemented
by dequeueing and requeueing a process .  The time a process 
has spent running probably reduced the the cpu time due it 
by only a bit. The process could get re-queued pretty close
to head of the queue, and may get scheduled again pretty
quickly if there is still a lot of cpu time due.  

It may make sense to queue the
yielding process a bit further behind in the queue. 
I made a slight change by zeroing out wait_runtime 
(i.e. have the process gives
up cpu time due for it to run) for experimentation. 
Let's put aside gripes that Volanomark should have used a 
better mechanism to coordinate threads instead sched_yield for 
a second.   Volanomark runs better
and is only 40% (instead of 80%) down from old scheduler 
without CFS.  

Of course we should not tune for Volanomark and this is
reference data. 
What are your view on how CFS's sched_yield should behave?

Regards,
Tim