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Kolivas Pushes New Kernel Responsiveness Patches

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  • Kolivas Pushes New Kernel Responsiveness Patches

    Phoronix: Kolivas Pushes New Kernel Responsiveness Patches

    Con Kolivas had stopped working on the Linux kernel for two years after he became fed up with the kernel development community, but last year he made a return by introducing the BFS scheduler. The BFS scheduler for the Linux kernel is quite simple in design compared to other schedulers, but it performed fairly well on desktop systems...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    It does not seem to be that new as there are dirs for .32 too:

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    • #3
      I seriously question the value of what is produced by this guy. Seems to me that more often than not, his work is unusably buggy and makes things explode in MS like frequency. There may be fringe cases that could benefit from a *decent* implementation of some of his ideas, but it is definitely not of benefit for general users. Especially not in the forms he produces them.

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      • #4
        I am particularly suspicious of the 10000Hz patch. A higher tick rate means more overhead. On the other hand, the overhead may still be tolerable on a fast system.

        Really, the thing that annoys me the most is system unresponsiveness in the face of high I/O. I can understand that reading a file can take a while if there is a lot of other disk I/O going on, but switching tabs on my browser should not be affected.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by droidhacker View Post
          I seriously question the value of what is produced by this guy. Seems to me that more often than not, his work is unusably buggy and makes things explode in MS like frequency. There may be fringe cases that could benefit from a *decent* implementation of some of his ideas, but it is definitely not of benefit for general users. Especially not in the forms he produces them.
          i personally consider CK one of few people hacking the kernel that actually understand what "desktop linux" should be about. that's what i respect about him.

          i remember the argument about BFS performance back on lkml, which clearly showed that linux developers have little idea of things average users do on their desktops.

          don't get me wrong - as much as i value CK, i still don't like his attitude :]

          now that he started making kernel patchsets again, his fanboys are probably flocking back (remember them from cfs vs SD flamewars?)

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          • #6
            It's good that he is working on his own implementations of schedulers and so on, so we can overtake them (if they are better) or use them to see bottlenecks in other implementation. It's a good thing that he helps, I can't see a problem with it.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by yoshi314 View Post
              i personally consider CK one of few people hacking the kernel that actually understand what "desktop linux" should be about. that's what i respect about him.
              Agreed. While I am not able to judge his code, I have experienced much better system responsiveness under heavy disk I/O with BFS than with any other scheduler in recent kernels. I also think that the argument that BFS's benefits do not scale well with high number of processors is totally moot since most of us will likely be sitting on machines with eight cores or less for years to come. BFS seems to have gotten more appreciation among the Android hacking crowd than among "traditional" linux hackers and is often available as an option for various ROMs published over at xda-developers.

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              • #8
                I'm using BFS almost since it came out. Without it, Linux here is much worse than Windows in GUI responsiveness. With BFS it's almost on-par.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by waucka View Post
                  Really, the thing that annoys me the most is system unresponsiveness in the face of high I/O. I can understand that reading a file can take a while if there is a lot of other disk I/O going on, but switching tabs on my browser should not be affected.
                  I asked myself the same question.
                  From my "investigation" the fault lies also with Firefox. When you "just" switch tabs actually Firefox also reads/writes some files and that's where the unresponsiveness comes from (my hdd has very poor iops).

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by karl View Post
                    I asked myself the same question.
                    From my "investigation" the fault lies also with Firefox. When you "just" switch tabs actually Firefox also reads/writes some files and that's where the unresponsiveness comes from (my hdd has very poor iops).
                    Who's talking about Firefox? The problem is more general. 2.6.32 introduced changes in its scheduler (actually inspired by BFS) to make things better. But still, BFS gives better results.

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