Re: scheduler nice 19 versus 'idle' behavior / static low-priorityscheduling

From: Nathanael Hoyle
Date: Fri Jan 30 2009 - 01:52:19 EST


On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 07:24 +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 00:49 -0500, Nathanael Hoyle wrote:
>
> > Recently I installed the Folding@Home client, which many of you may be
> > familiar with, intended to utilize spare CPU cycles to perform protein
> > folding simulations in order to further medical research. It is not a
> > multi-threaded client at this point, so it simply runs four instances on
> > my system, since it has four cores. It is configured to run at
> > nice-level 19.
> >
> > Because it is heavily optimized, and needs little external data to
> > perform its work, it spends almost all of its time cpu-bound, with
> > little to no io-wait or blocking on network calls, etc. I had been
> > using it for about a week with no real difficulty until I went to watch
> > another DVD and found that the video was slightly stuttery/jerky so long
> > as foldingathome was running in the background. Once I shut it down,
> > the video playback resumed its normal smooth form.
>
> Sounds like a problem was recently fixed. Can you try 2.6.29-rc3 or
> 2.6.28.2?
>
> -Mike
>

I will try to do so as soon as I get the chance. Do you have any
specific info on the problem that you believe was fixed and/or the fix
applied?

Thanks,
-Nathanael

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