On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Bryan Henderson wrote:
> >IMO preemptive kernel patches are an
> >exercise in masturbation (bad algorithm that can be preempted at any
> point
> >is still a bad algorithm and should be fixed, not hidden)
>
> What does this mean? What is a preemptive kernel patch and what kind of
> bad algorithm are you contemplating, and what does it mean to hide one?
>
> You're apparently referring back to some well known argument, but I'm not
> familiar with it myself.
Sigh... Long story. Basically, there was a bunch of patches floating
around, starting with "low-latency" (aka. "let's stick schedule() in
every place we see in profiles") and continued with "let's count
spinlocks taken and allow to preempt whenever the counter is 0". All of
them were advertised to solve the problems with high latency, but
apparently people who were pushing that stuff completely missed a
simple observation: when kernel spends too much in some loop it's a
symptom of a problem, not the problem itself...
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