On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 19:29, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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?
Simple enough; don't renice with any kernels. The advantage of nice -10 X on vanilla 2.4 is too small to warrant such confusing setups and scripts all over the place. Con
