The end of tasklets
The end of tasklets
Posted Feb 6, 2024 18:07 UTC (Tue) by willy (subscriber, #9762)In reply to: The end of tasklets by Wol
Parent article: The end of tasklets
But this is, was and always has been the game. I was part of it when I worked for Intel on Linux in the mid-2000s. Team A would work on Benchmark B and produce a result that beat Linux. So we'd take a look at what bottlenecks Benchmark B had on Linux, eliminate one, rerun the benchmark. Repeat until we beat Team A. Send patches upstream. Team A would typically come back to us a month or two later with an improved result and we'd repeat until either we or Team A lost interest.
Competition is healthy, and as long as Benchmark B represents a real customer workload (and you're actually eliminating bottlenecks, not putting in special hacks for Benchmark B), this is a win for everybody. The downside of Linux basically making every other kernel irrelevant is that we've lost that impetus.
See also LLVM vs GCC, Firefox vs Chrome, etc, etc.
Posted Feb 7, 2024 10:54 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (1 responses)
To some extent, the old thing of multiple competing forks of Linux provided the competition; if you have a choice between Torvalds, Cox, Kolivas and other kernels, where the Torvalds fork is the blessed version, and the Cox, Kolivas and other forks make different compromises to Torvalds. And then, the fact that for some workloads, Cox or Kolivas is "better" than Torvalds (but not for others) provides the impetus to work out whether there's a way to do better than all the forks include Torvalds' fork.
To a limited degree, we've seen this with EEVDF; there were the latency-nice patches floating around (and efforts made to get latency-nice to fit in with the design of the CFS scheduler), which triggered investigation into alternatives to CFS, and then inspired Zijlstra to implement EEVDF in a way that matched or beat CFS while also providing latency-nice.
Posted Feb 7, 2024 11:04 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
And this is why Torvalds is such a good manager (and steward). He's not attached to his version, and he actively encourages these short-lived forks precisely to find the best way to do things. Which he then shamelessly appropriates :-)
Cheers,
The end of tasklets
The end of tasklets
Wol