state of Fedora kernel and Desktop use?

Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic at gmail.com
Fri Oct 24 12:31:06 UTC 2008


On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 01:05:00PM +0200, Valent Turkovic wrote:
>>Hi devels & all,
>>I'll be brief so not to take much of your time.
>>
>>I read this article [1] about general Linux kernel development and how
>>desktop use is ignored by mainstream kernel developers, and how
>>desktop performance is suffering because of that.
>>
>>I took out this quote to summarize:
>>"I think the kernel developers at large haven't got the faintest idea
>>just how big the problems in userspace are. It is a very small brave
>>minority that are happy to post to lkml, and I keep getting users
>>telling me on IRC, in person, and via my own mailing list, what their
>>problems are. And they've even become fearful of me, even though I've
>>never viewed myself as a real kernel developer."
>>
>>What is the status of Fedora kernel regarding specific patches that
>>make desktop perform better? Is is true that mostly big vendor issues
>
> The status is the same here as it is for every other kind of patch.
> Fedora tries very hard to not carry additional patches.  With the
> exception of a few things like exec-shield, if the patches aren't
> upstream or headed there rapidly, they generally aren't carried.
>
> It's easier to talk about specific patches when they are pointed out.
> Neither the interview, nor you did that so I don't really know what
> sort of patches you're talking about.

Interview focused on specific issues - "Staircase Deadline CPU scheduler"

to quote again from the artcle (page 2/3)

"The Staircase Deadline CPU scheduler. Initially started as a side
project from the Staircase CPU scheduler I soon realised that it was
possible to have excellent interactivity while fixing the horrible
fairness issues that an unfair design had. Furthermore, it actually
improved interactivity issues elsewhere that ended up being fairness
problems, and fairness is of course paramount to servers and multiuser
environments."

and also:

"One very vocal user found that the unfair behaviour in the mainline
scheduler was something he came to expect. A flamewar of sorts erupted
at the time, because to fix 100% of the problems with the CPU
scheduler we had to sacrifice interactivity on some workloads. It
wasn't a dramatic loss of interactivity, but it was definitely there.
Rather than use 'nice' to proportion CPU according to where the user
told the operating system it should be, the user believed it was the
kernel's responsibility to guess. As it turns out, it is the fact that
guessing means that no matter how hard and how smart you make the CPU
scheduler, it will get it wrong some of the time. The more it tries to
guess, the worse will be the corner cases of misbehaving."

Sorry for quoting, but I'm not a developer, just a curious user :)

Thank you very much for replying.

Valent.


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