On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Con Kolivas wrote: > Hi all > > I'm a long time Mandrake user and am the person responsible for the base patch > in the multimedia kernel and all the interactivity changes that have gone > into the 2.6 development kernel (from 2.6.0-test6). A couple of years ago > when I was subscribed to this list I suggested renicing X by default to -10 > and noticed that it was done on the following release by default. That was a > recommendation based on the default kernel's scheduler inability to make X > smooth enough under load. > > However I am going to have to recommend reversing that change now as the new > kernel has been tuned to allow good performance of X at nice 0. The new O(1) > scheduler is far more aggressive with treatment of priorities and has much > larger timeslices. Giving X a priority of -10 will make it cause unnecessary > scheduling latencies for tasks that use even small amounts of cpu such as > audio playback. In a nutshell this means that renicing X will make audio skip > with a 2.6 kernel on even modern hardware.
I know, I have been thinking longer about adding some extra init.d script for multimedia kernel to renice X when booting into kernel-mm, and since I doubt 2.6 will be perfect for everybody by the time 10.0 comes out it might be a good idea to renice X only when the new scheduler is used. Con, do you know of any quick way to check in bash/perl whether or not it is useful to nice X to -10? Or should we just check for kernel > 2.6 or kernel= kernel-multimedia? d. > > Please CC me in any replies as I'm no longer subscribed to cooker. > > Cheers, > Con > >
