i'm wondering, in previous schedulers, under what situations did you
notice smoothness problems? Was the scenario in any way deterministic,
or just random delays that are hard to describe?
Just in case you have smoothness problems in the future, a good way of
measuring it objectively is to enable CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y and
CONFIG_SCHEDSTATS=y and to monitor the se.wait_max field in the
/proc/PID/tasks/*/sched file[s].
Every time there's some ruckle or other smoothness problem, that field's
value should increase. (a few milliseconds up to a few dozen
milliseconds is fine normally - anything above 100 msecs is probably
less fine.) By looking at that latency field you can compare two
kernels. (And by echoing 0 to the sched file you can clear these stats.)
So by saying "under .23-rc8 se.wait_max was 50 msecs while in .24-rc1 it
increased to 250 msecs" everyone can effectively complain to us about
you are welcome!
Ingo
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