System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness

[ms178]

Sounds like a behavior that should have been the default on all non-server distributions from the beginning of time. Why has it not been the case?

Desktop gaming wasn't that much of a focus of the big Linux distributions up to this point in time. Or they would have put more effort into providing an optimized out-of-the box experience like Clear Linux does in terms of performance in general. Just one example, in my testing, the default Kernels of openSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro, Fedora and various Ubuntu-derivatives are giving far worse performance in Company of Heroes 2 (which is heavily CPU bound and which I use for ease of testing). They yield at best only around half of the FPS which I get with a custom-compiled Xanmod Kernel. As you see, there is much performance left to be had already. I managed to squeeze another 10 % improvement on top of that with a lot of effort in compiling other gaming related packages with aggressive compiler flags, but the time and risk of breakage is hardly worth that additional effort. But it would be nice to get that performance for free by default from the distros.

[mirmirmir]

Sounds like a behavior that should have been the default on all non-server distributions from the beginning of time. Why has it not been the case?

it's already the case, but someone wants to be mentioned in the news headline

[jacob]

Is desktop scheduling really that big of a problem that it need it's own management daemon?

It is actually. Optimising for perceived responsiveness and balancing that against battery lifetime and cooling requirements is a difficult problem

[sarmad]

Sounds like a behavior that should have been the default on all non-server distributions from the beginning of time. Why has it not been the case?

[Quackdoc]

I hope this is implemented well

system76-schedulerD

[bug77]

Seems an interesting idea if it makes a noticeable difference. Hopefully it can also work with different shells.


Although it is a Rust project, and to make things worse, it does not use GPL license. This will indeed trigger some of the purists out here.

Well, at least the idea of giving the desktop environment a higher priority seems like a du-uh moment.

At least I don't care about about the language it is written in, but if the project is effective. There is a variety of CPU schedulers on the Kernel-level already and noticed small improvements lately while using PDS/BMQ but nothing too major. As this project comes from the user-space side, is this a potential limitation?

Schedulers always yield "nothing too major". They're a balancing game and as such, you can't tailor them too specific to some workloads, because you'll hurt others. The idea here seems to be make the configuration of the scheduler dynamic instead. I can see that working, if executed right.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

can we get systemd rewrite in rust ?

[andrei_me]

It's in a different ballpark. (...).

Getting answers directly from the developer of the project

[bachchain]

Is desktop scheduling really that big of a problem that it need it's own management daemon?