Intel Exploring CPU+GPU Synchronized Priority Scheduling For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Exploring CPU+GPU Synchronized Priority Scheduling For Linux

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are evaluating possible improvements to the Linux kernel for accommodating CPU and GPU synchronized priority scheduling...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-CPU-GPU-Prio-Nice-Sched

[boxie]

That's kinda cool - strange that graphics workloads are not already scheduled nicely (or am I missing something and they already accept hints for other drivers - just Intel getting their parts in place?)

[MadeUpName]

Nice.

[pranav]

Well, I DO NOT understand for some reason. Basically what?!

[MadeUpName]

The nice command allows you to set the priority that an application gets on the CPU. So some thing time critical like playing a movie gets on the CPU more often than a low priority job like say doing a backup. That allows the CPU to feel more responsive than it actually is. You can see the nice value that the tasks running on your machine have by running the top command and looking at the NI column. negative numbers get higher priority and higher numbers get lower priority. If you have a running process that is bogging down the your system you can use the renice command to deprioritize it.

This patch change is giving you the ability to do the same thing for the GPU. So in my case if I was rendering a movie which uses both the CPU and GPU I could still be editing with out massive stuttering because of the render running in the background. This is a pretty useful patch. As more and more applications adopt openCL or vulkan compute this will become more important.