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

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Message-ID: <20070417070155.GF1057@wotan.suse.de>
Date:	Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:01:55 +0200
From:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
To:	William Lee Irwin III <wli@...omorphy.com>
Cc:	Peter Williams <pwil3058@...pond.net.au>,
	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]

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.

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).

I wouldn't like to see a significant drop in any micro or macro
benchmarks or even worse real workloads, but I could accept some if it
means haaving a fair scheduler by default.

Now it isn't actually too hard to achieve the above, I think. The hard bit
is trying to compare interactivity. Ideally, we'd be able to get scripted
dumps of login sessions, and measure scheduling latencies of key proceses
(sh/X/wm/xmms/firefox/etc).  People would send a dump if they were having
problems with any scheduler, and we could compare all of them against it.
Wishful thinking!
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