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An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 2, 2003 23:38 UTC (Wed) by Lovechild (guest, #3592)
Parent article: An interview with Linus Torvalds

2.5 is horrible on the desktop - several users (myself included) so far have complained about sound skipping and jerky mouse and window movement.

And to my horror it seems that the hackers are still aiming for the sky, and everytime someone points out a possible improvement towards desktop users, somebody yells database, server, etc. and the idea is never tested.

Maybe it's time to make a toplevel switch to desktop/server - so we could get the best of both worlds in the source and let the user decide which to use at compile time. This would mean that if DESKTOP is set then CFQ replaces AS as the default IO scheduler, Different process scheduler setting is used, and other tweaking. I would hate for Linus to decide that the desktop was to be left to vendors to handle in their own trees.

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An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 3, 2003 0:32 UTC (Thu) by mbp (subscriber, #2737) [Link]

Well, to some extent this can be done by setting different options or merging non-Linus patches. Distributors are probably the right people to do this, not Linus. For example, RedHat give you a different kernel in the desktop-oriented install rather than the server-oriented install, and Gentoo by default uses a 2.4 with patches for better interactive/desktop performance. End users should not need to recompile.

We don't want too much divergence though. Eventually it ought to be possible to have a single codebase that builds for both systems, but as development proceeds different patches can favor one over the other.

An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 3, 2003 1:07 UTC (Thu) by StevenCole (guest, #3068) [Link]

My experience with recent 2.5.x kernels for desktop use has been different. After several hours of heavy use, the 2.5 systems remain responsive, while the default kernels of RedHat 9 and Mandrake 9.1 become less responsive and make more use of swap. The mouse with 2.5 is much slower and I have to increase the pointer acceleration in KDE to make 2.5 useable. Your mileage does vary, and it's important that your issues get resolved.

Linus's dual AMD box from two years ago was assembled about 3 blocks from where I lived at the time. Nice machine then, nice machine now. Recently he's been using a 4-way desktop (according to a post on lkml), so he may not notice some regressions which are evident to others.

As Linus pointed out above:

...it's always hard to anticipate everything that pops up when a lot of new people start moving over from 2.4.x to 2.6.x.

Desktop useability will always be one of the most important things. Maybe Linus will announce 2.6.0-test1 at OLS next month, which will likely increase the number of testers substantially. I hope those testers having difficulties will complain loudly and intelligently enough to be heard.

As mbp noted, distributers can and do provide differing kernels for differing purposes, but this can and should only be carried so far. If the core code diverges too far from what is optimal for desktop use, then maintaining those different kernels will become an increasing burden.

An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 3, 2003 14:38 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

The switch exists already. It's called CONFIG_PREEMPT. If you care about jerky mouse, enable it. If you care about average speed, disable it.

An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 4, 2003 1:51 UTC (Fri) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]

"2.5 is horrible on the desktop - several users (myself included) so far have complained about sound skipping and jerky mouse and window movement"

Con Kolivas' interactivity patch fixes things up a great deal. It's now in 2.5.74-mm (Andrew Morton's kernel):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.5/2.5.74/2.5.74-mm1

Window dragging doesn't make sound skip any more. You can still make sound skip by scrolling in Mozilla, but Con's busy tweaking the patch. Before this, ogg playing on 2.5 was definitely painful, now it's tolerable. Expect more improvement in the not too distant future, especially if you keep testing and complaining :-)

An interview with Linus Torvalds

Posted Jul 12, 2003 18:48 UTC (Sat) by Ekdikeo (guest, #12867) [Link]

Try 2.5.75. I just went from 2.5.73 to 2.5.75 and was -totally- amazed by the difference. I had a ton of broken modules before, all of them compiled flawlessly. I couldn't insert any modules before (and yes, I had the correct mod tools) because dependencies couldn't be resolved (i presume because half my modules wouldn't compile) .. they all compile, and insert. it's beautiful. it's like butta.

Also, my memory usage on startup went from like 65MB to 20MB, and after loading X (with fvwm2) I still have about 70MB free on a 128MB system.

The response time is INCREDIBLE compared to 2.4 and previous 2.5 series.

Also, if you're running Debian, make sure that your X package is NOT set to nice the Xserver by -10. That improved response time in 2.4 and previous, but is actually a bad thing for the improved task schedulers in 2.5.