Because I can

Posted Sep 7, 2009 22:20 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Well, this settles it for me by bvdm
Parent article: BFS vs. mainline scheduler benchmarks and measurements

As for netbooks, if interactivity (people keep posting about gaming FPS and high-def audio and high-res desktop experience) is such a concern, why are you using a netbook?

Because they are light and cute? You have not understood what "interactivity" means. People do not post about FPS or high-def audio per se, but about jitter, frame drops and audio skips. Those are really nasty when watching a movie or listening to music, and computers are said to be multitasking these days.

to post comments

Because I can

Posted Sep 9, 2009 7:57 UTC (Wed) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link] (3 responses)

Jitter, frame drops, and audio skips are all *easily measurable*. Yet *none* of the advocacy of BFS that I've seen includes any measure of these things. Only vague hand-waving about smoothness. Perhaps these people should color the edges of there disks with green markers... I hear it reduces jitter.

Meanwhile I do audio processing with a ~2ms processing interval using the mainline scheduler, thrashing the system, high loads... and underruns are basically unheard of at least after tossing the drivers and hardware that I determined were misbehaving (with measurements, ... imagine that!)

I don't doubt that there are genuine areas for improvement, even in the scheduler but it isn't going to get better without real measurements and some social skills superior to those of Hans Reiser.

Interactive benchmarks

Posted Sep 9, 2009 20:14 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

You are right, there are no benchmarks that show that BFS is good at interactivity. However I contend that such "hand-waving" is to be expected from an anaesthetist and a crowd of enthusiasts (and is not a bad thing at all). The real pity is that on lkml, a list full of high-flying engineers, nobody has been able to construct those benchmarks or do those measurements either. The best we have is a scheduler hacker posting odd benchmarks on esoteric hardware. No offense for Ingo, he was very respectful and had interesting data, but it was all biased:

we tune the Linux scheduler for desktop and small-server workloads mostly [...] what i consider a sane range of systems to tune for - and should still fit into BFS's design bracket as well according to your description: it's a dual quad core system with hyperthreading

And then repeating the measures on a quad-core machine, the best he has offered so far. It seems that, despite having an expressed focus on the desktop, a netbook and a few days for testing on it are out of reach.

As to the benchmarks, the first test was how fast can he build the kernel using n processes. Well, this is only measuring thoughput; if each process is supposed to be interactive, it is not unreasonable to expect that they will more easily interrupted and thus the build will last longer. Then a very artificial pipe-messaging test, followed by similarly contrived benchmarks -- which CFS has already been tuned to. So the "other side" (lkml) has not been able to produce anything better either to show that CFS is good at interactivity, measuring skips and jitter, and I find this to be even more pitiful.

Interactive benchmarks

Posted Sep 9, 2009 23:40 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

> As to the benchmarks, the first test was how fast can he build the kernel using n processes.

To be fair, that benchmark is originally Con's, not Ingo's (Con's original announcement claims that "make -j4 on a quad core machine with BFS is faster than *any* choice of job numbers on CFS").

Interactive benchmarks

Posted Sep 10, 2009 9:52 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

More to the point: even when one side proposed invalid benchmarks, the other side was not able to come up with anything better. (And no, "beat them at their own benchmarks" is not a valid excuse; we are talking about engineering, not about marketing.)