Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262824AbTI2E4u (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Sep 2003 00:56:50 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262827AbTI2E4u (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Sep 2003 00:56:50 -0400 Received: from dyn-ctb-203-221-72-163.webone.com.au ([203.221.72.163]:28164 "EHLO chimp.local.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262824AbTI2E4s (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Sep 2003 00:56:48 -0400 Message-ID: <3F77BB2C.7030402@cyberone.com.au> Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:55:08 +1000 From: Nick Piggin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030827 Debian/1.4-3 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: rob@landley.net CC: Con Kolivas , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.0-test6 References: <200309281703.53067.kernel@kolivas.org> <200309280502.36177.rob@landley.net> In-Reply-To: <200309280502.36177.rob@landley.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Rob Landley wrote: >On Sunday 28 September 2003 02:03, Con Kolivas wrote: > >>On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 11:27, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> >>>from Andrew Morton. Most notably perhaps Con's scheduler changes that >>>have been discussed extensively and made it into the -mm tree for >>>testing. >>> >>For those who are trying this for the first time, please note that the >>scheduler has been tuned to tell the difference between tasks of the _same_ >>nice level. This means do NOT renice X or it will make audio skip unless >>you also renice your audio application by the same amount. Lots of >>distributions have done this for the old 2.4 scheduler which could not >>treat equal "nice" levels as differently as the new scheduler does and 2.6 >>shouldn't need special treatment. >> >>So for testing note the following points: >> >>Make sure X is NOT reniced to -10 as many distributions are doing. >>Some shells spawn processes at nice +5 by default and this will make audio >>apps suffer. >>Make sure your hard disk, graphics card and audio card are performing at >>equal standard to your 2.4 kernel (ie dma is working, graphics is fully >>accelerated etc). >> > >I.E. with your new scheduler, priority levels actually have enough of an >effect now that things that aren't reniced can be noticeably starved by >things that are. > AFAIK, Con's scheduler doesn't change the nice implementation at all. Possibly some of his changes amplify its problems, or, more likely they remove most other scheduler problems leaving this one noticable. If X is running at -20, and xmms at +19, xmms is supposed to still get 5% of the CPU. Should be enough to run fine. Unfortunately this is achieved by giving X very large timeslices, so xmms's scheduling latency becomes large. The interactivity bonuses don't help, either. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/