While I've been stuck(?) here in Europe having a ball occasionally checking my email on weird keyboards I've been thinking about the evolution and completion of the staircase scheduler design.

One thing I can tell you is that I've been thinking a lot about the code and have 3 changes planned for it. 2 involve real infrastructure changes that should complete the scheduler design without increasing it's complexity significantly. The other is the simple removal of these lines from kernel/sched.c which you can do right now:

        // All normal tasks within a priority level round robin at RR_INTERVAL.
        if (!(p->slice % RR_INTERVAL) && !batch_task(p)) {
                set_tsk_need_resched(p);
                dequeue_task(p, rq);
                enqueue_task(p, rq);
        }

They dont work as I intended and should maintain better cpu balance for different nice levels and increase cpu throughput. This is the version in -ck and the one in mainline is slightly different (no batch reference) but the lines should also be deleted.

Have fun.
Con