Re: Question about fair schedulers

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Wed Jun 27 2007 - 16:27:23 EST


Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
On Saturday 23 June 2007, Tom Spink wrote:
Alberto,

If you're feeling adventurous, grab the latest kernel and patch it
with Ingo's scheduler: CFS.

You may be pleasantly surprised.

Thanks, I might if I have to courage to patch and compile my own kernel :)

However, I'd also need to change all my applications to set them with the right priority to see the good results, so I think I might just wait until it lands in mainline.

In general not the case. I generally don't diddle my priorities, there's rarely a need.

Just to check if I understood everything correctly:

The mainline scheduler tries to be smart and guess the priority of each task, and while it mostly hits the nail right in the head, sometimes it hits you right in the thumb.

Fair schedulers, on the contrary, forget about trying to be smart and just care about being fair, leaving the priority settings to where they belong: applications.

Is this more or less correct?

Incomplete. The CFS scheduler seems to do better with latency, so you may get less CPU to a process but it doesn't wind up waiting a long time to get a fair share. So it "feels better" without micro tuning.

Face it, if you have more jobs than CPU no scheduler is going to make you really happy.

Alberto.



--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/