X scheduling fairness

Posted Apr 27, 2007 15:58 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: This week in the scheduling discussion by pjones
Parent article: This week in the scheduling discussion

There is no part of the screen that's more important to get right than any other.

What if you have a long compile job running in an xterm and are simultaneously browsing the web? Wouldn't you prefer that CPU time go to drawing the browser windows than updating the xterm?

With the proposed approximation to credit transfer, it's possible for the X server to use the browser's credit on behalf of the less urgent compile job.

And even if you're simplistically setting a goal of having each consumer process get the same amount of CPU time, it's possible things would work out so the compile job would get more CPU time than the browser.