People were happy for years...

People were happy for years...

Posted Oct 14, 2009 20:43 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Correction! by clugstj
Parent article: Deadline scheduling for Linux

Where is the "killer app" for the deadline scheduler

Where is the killer app for multitasking OS? People used DOS for ten years and were happy. Why, they even had background printing and other goodies - with resident programs. Then suddenly... OS/2, Windows, Linux, etc. WTF all the hoopla is all about?

As long as your system has one and one realtime program only - you don't need deadline scheduler. But if you have two... Think mobile phone: you have two competing real-time tasks. One is game you are playing right now and another is actual phone application which sends and receives calls! I sure as hell want to have high response times from my games (and I currently don't have that) but if someone calls me - all bets are off. If game can survive - I'm happy, but if not - I don't care.

Sure you can do this with todays scheduler and some tricks... like you can run print.exe for background printing in DOS. Both are poor, fragile solutions.

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