[ANNOUNCE] BFS cpu scheduler v0.316

From: Con Kolivas
Date: Mon May 03 2010 - 05:23:19 EST


This is to briefly announce the immediate availability of the desktop
interactivity focused BFS CPU scheduler version 0.316 which is a minor bugfix.

The only changes since version 0.315 affect performance on uniprocessor
machines. A long-standing bug was found that would prevent tasks being woken
up and scheduled properly on very idle machines when woken up by network
activity (and the like) only. This would cause great lag when the only
activity happening on the machine was network based (such as a network based
install or ssh session).

Thanks to Byron Stanoszek for spotting the bug and testing the fix which has
been present for some time (since bfs 0.232). Surprisingly, only 2 people have
reported this bug in the last 5 months meaning either this was a rare
workload, or there are very few uniprocessor BFS machines out there, or people
just don't report bugs. I suspect it was a combination of all of the above.

The change to 0.316 will not have any effect on kernels built with SMP
support. Fortunately, all pclinuxOS kernels (the largest current distribution
using BFS in its kernels) are built with SMP support enabled so will not
suffer from this bug. However, all -ck users for the last 2 kernels with
kernels built with uniprocessor support will be affected. I will probably be
providing new -ck kernels with this one bugfix in the near future.


Versions are available for 2.6.32 and 2.6.33

http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/2.6.32-sched-bfs-316.patch
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/2.6.33-sched-bfs-316.patch

Also, Richard Ross has kindly provided a patch for 2.6.27 for hero HTC android
users:
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/Unofficial-BFS-316-HEROC-2.6.27.patch

Regards,
Con

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