Re: interactive task starvation

[Peter Williams]

Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 13:59 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 01:07:58PM +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
>
> > > I can make the knobs compile time so we don't see random behavior
> > > reports, but I don't think they can be totally eliminated.  Would that
> > > be sufficient?
> > >
> > > If so, the numbers as delivered should be fine for desktop boxen I
> > > think.  People who are building custom kernels can bend to fit as
> > > always.
> >
> > That would suit me perfectly. I think I would set them both to zero.
> > It's not clear to me what workload they can help, it seems that they
> > try to allow a sometimes unfair scheduling.
>
>
> Correct.  Massively unfair scheduling is what interactivity requires.

Selective unfairness not massive unfairness is what's required.  The 
hard part is automating the selectiveness especially when there are 
three quite different types of task that need special treatment: 1) the 
X server, 2) normal interactive tasks and 3) media streamers; each of 
which has different behavioural characteristics.  A single mechanism 
that classifies all of these as "interactive" will unfortunately catch a 
lot of tasks that don't belong to any one of these types.

Peter
--
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
 -- Ambrose Bierce
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