On Tue, 2001-10-09 at 23:06, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> [...]
> I think the issue you raise is that dbench gets a 10msec more of cpu
> time and xmms starts running 10msec later than expected (because of the
> scheduler latency peak worst case of 10msec).
>
> But that doesn't matter. The scheduler isn't perfect anyways. The
> resolution of the scheduler is 10msec too, so you can easily lose 10msec
> anywhere else no matter of whatever scheduler latency of 10msec. [...]
I agree with generally everything you say.
I think, however, you are making two assumptions:
(a) xmms has a very large leeway in the timing of its execution
(b) the maximum time a process sits in kernel space is 10ms.
While I agree (a) is true, it may not be so in all scenerios.
Furthermore, the specified leeway does not exist for all timing-critical
tasks. Not all of these tasks are specialized real-time applications,
either.
Most importantly, however, the maximum latency of the system is not
10ms. Even _with_ preemption, we have observed greater latencies (due
to long held locks).
This is why I believe the a preemptible kernel benefits more than just
real-time signal processing.
Robert Love
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 15 2001 - 21:00:29 EST