The end of tasklets

Posted Feb 7, 2024 10:54 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: The end of tasklets by willy
Parent article: The end of tasklets

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.

The end of tasklets

Posted Feb 7, 2024 11:04 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> 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.

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,
Wol