linux-kernel - Re: [Announce] [patch] Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler [CFS]

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Date:	Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:23:42 +1000
From:	Peter Williams <pwil3058@...pond.net.au>
To:	Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>
CC:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>,
	William Lee Irwin III <wli@...omorphy.com>,
	Mike Galbraith <efault@....de>,
	Con Kolivas <kernel@...ivas.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	ck list <ck@....kolivas.org>,
	Bill Huey <billh@...ppy.monkey.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Subject: Re: [Announce] [patch] Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair
 Scheduler [CFS]

Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 09:01:55AM +0200, Nick Piggin wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 11:26:21PM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 11:09:55PM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>>>>> All things are not equal; they all have different properties. I like
>>> On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 08:15:03AM +0200, Nick Piggin wrote:
>>>> Exactly. So we have to explore those properties and evaluate performance
>>>> (in all meanings of the word). That's only logical.
>>> Any chance you'd be willing to put down a few thoughts on what sorts
>>> of standards you'd like to set for both correctness (i.e. the bare
>>> minimum a scheduler implementation must do to be considered valid
>>> beyond not oopsing) and performance metrics (i.e. things that produce
>>> numbers for each scheduler you can compare to say "this scheduler is
>>> better than this other scheduler at this.").
>> Yeah I guess that's the hard part :)
>>
>> For correctness, I guess fairness is an easy one. I think that unfairness
>> is basically a bug and that it would be very unfortunate to merge something
>> unfair. But this is just within the context of a single runqueue... for
>> better or worse, we allow some unfairness in multiprocessors for performance
>> reasons of course.
> 
> I'm a big fan of fairness, but I think it's a bit early to declare it
> a mandatory feature. Bounded unfairness is probably something we can
> agree on, ie "if we decide to be unfair, no process suffers more than
> a factor of x".
>  
>> Latency. Given N tasks in the system, an arbitrary task should get
>> onto the CPU in a bounded amount of time (excluding events like freak
>> IRQ holdoffs and such, obviously -- ie. just considering the context
>> of the scheduler's state machine).
> 
> This is a slightly stronger statement than starvation-free (which is
> obviously mandatory). I think you're looking for something like
> "worst-case scheduling latency is proportional to the number of
> runnable tasks".

add "taking into consideration nice and/or real time priorities of 
runnable tasks".  I.e. if a task is nice 19 it can expect to wait longer 
to get onto the CPU than if it was nice 0.

> Which I think is quite a reasonable requirement.
> 
> I'm pretty sure the stock scheduler falls short of both of these
> guarantees though.
> 

Peter
-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@...pond.net.au

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