state of Fedora kernel and Desktop use?

[Linus Walleij]

fre 2008-10-24 klockan 13:05 +0200 skrev Valent Turkovic:

> What is the status of Fedora kernel regarding specific patches that
> make desktop perform better?

The CFS was merged ages ago and there is a very wide consensus that it
gives the same kind of interactivity boost as CK:s rotating staircase.

On top of that the control groups for CPU slicing will be available in
F10. There is no consensus of how to make use for it in the desktop
scenarios though, so won't add much as for now. Control groups look like
they will be able to e.g. prioritize things like the memory hierarchy
and network traffic for the desktop use case (as well as other use
cases) in the long (well, some year or two) run, but it is being
intensely developed right now.

Swap prefetch was the most interesting patch from the CK tree IMHO:
http://lwn.net/Articles/242765/
Sadly I don't know what has happend in this regard :-/ Anyone else?

While we're at interactivity, there is this thing called "ionice" that
interacts with the CFQ I/O scheduler from userspace. It is probably a
good idea  to "ionice -c1" (realtime) things like your Gstreamer or
mplayer, and "ionice -c3" (idle) your transmission bittorrent client,
updatedb or backup tasks. I do this manually from time to time, but
cannot really claim I notice any big differences. Such heuristic
ionice:ing is nowhere to be seen, does anyone know if it is being looked
into anywhere at all?

All in all, there are popping up some real nice interactivity features
in the kernel, but AFAIK noone is really working on using them in the
desktop usecase.

Just my Euro 0.01...
Linus