Re: [PATCH] 2.5.72 O(1) interactivity bugfix

[Mike Galbraith]

At 06:57 PM 6/19/2003 +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:

>Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
>>At 05:33 PM 6/19/2003 +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
>>
>>>Mike Galbraith wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>However, that will also send X and friends go off to the expired array 
>>>>_very_ quickly.  This will certainly destroy interactive feel under 
>>>>load because your desktop can/will go away for seconds at a time.  Try 
>>>>to drag a window while a make -j10 is running, and it'll get choppy as 
>>>>heck.  AFAIKT, anything that you do to increase concurrency in a global 
>>>>manner is _going_ to have the side effect of damaging interactive feel 
>>>>to some extent.  The one and only source of desktop responsiveness is 
>>>>the large repository of cpu ticks a task is allowed to save up for a rainy day.
>>>>
>>>>What I would love to figure out is a way to reintroduce back-boost 
>>>>without it having global impact.  I think hogging the cpu is absolutely 
>>>>_wonderful_ when the hogs are the tasks I'm interacting 
>>>>with.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to determine whether a 
>>>>human is intimately involved or not other than to specifically tell the 
>>>>scheduler this via renice.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Could certian drivers or subsystems say they are interactive and
>>>provide some input to the scheduler that way? Reads from input
>>>devices for example could increase a processes "interactivity" a
>>>lot, while writes to console or ... no, everything gets multiplexed
>>>through X, doesn't it...
>>
>>
>>The mouse and keyboard are wonderful candidates for this... there's 
>>always a human connected.  It's too bad there's no way to tell if a human 
>>is staring at the display.  If I'm mesmerized by xmms gl eye-candy, it's 
>>a highly interactive cpu hog.
>
>
>Thats right, but console / DRI / whatever could probably provide a small
>interactivity boost.

Yes.  I was thinking about the wastage when I get bored and minimize or 
cover up eye-candy.  For that kind of stuff, the existing scheduler 
syscalls would probably be much more efficient, because userland knows if I 
can see cpu oinker's output.

>>>The backboost was quite a good idea. I didn't follow it closely
>>>but what if you impemented the above idea, which increased
>>>an "interactiveness" number, then X clients could simply have
>>>their interactiveness value boosted by X?
>>
>>
>>Sounds good.  What I'm trying within the current framework is to let 
>>tasks which are extremely light weight (and not kernel threads) do 
>>backboost.  Dunno if anything good will come out of it.
>
>
>OK, the backboost is what? A dynamic priority boost? This is so
>X for example can be made interactive through its clients even
>if its hogging a lot of CPU, right?

Exactly.  That's what made backboost so wonderful... X/KDE wiggies boosted 
each other.

>I think it might be a good idea to introduce an "interactiveness"
>measurement which could be boosted by interactive devices, and a
>forwardboost would be able to increase an X client's interactivenss
>through X.

Yes.

>in

(messagus interruptus?)

         -Mike