benchmarks

It sounds as if Con could have much greater effect by posting benchmarks that mimic what he and those who agree with him consider typical use cases, and that do poorly under the current scheduler. The kernel people seem to be pretty good at hitting numeric targets they can reproduce.

Note that Con did write a tool that measures various latency aspects of the kernel scheduler: InterBench.

Interestingly, the BFS vs. mainline numbers Con posted are showing a mainline desktop latency advantage (also here).

(Caveat emptor: i have not done those measurements so i dont know how reliable they are - the standard deviation seems very high.)

Note that you dont 'have to' come up with a numeric result - a deterministic result that is described well and can be reproduced by a kernel developer is useful too.

Obviously numeric results have the not to be under-estimated advantage of removing subjective bias from tests. It turns a subjective impression into a hard number that cannot be ignored by either side of an argument. On the flip side, it's harder to obtain. latencytop should help out there for example.