• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    sched: Disable NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS for now · 3f2aa307
    Ingo Molnar authored
    Nikos Chantziaras and Jens Axboe reported that turning off
    NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS improves desktop interactivity visibly.
    
    Nikos described his experiences the following way:
    
      " With this setting, I can do "nice -n 19 make -j20" and
        still have a very smooth desktop and watch a movie at
        the same time.  Various other annoyances (like the
        "logout/shutdown/restart" dialog of KDE not appearing
        at all until the background fade-out effect has finished)
        are also gone.  So this seems to be the single most
        important setting that vastly improves desktop behavior,
        at least here. "
    
    Jens described it the following way, referring to a 10-seconds
    xmodmap scheduling delay he was trying to debug:
    
      " Then I tried switching NO_NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS on, and then
        I get:
    
        Performance counter stats for 'xmodmap .xmodmap-carl':
    
             9.009137  task-clock-msecs         #      0.447 CPUs
                   18  context-switches         #      0.002 M/sec
                    1  CPU-migrations           #      0.000 M/sec
                  315  page-faults              #      0.035 M/sec
    
        0.020167093  seconds time elapsed
    
        Woot! "
    
    So disable it for now. In perf trace output i can see weird
    delta timestamps:
    
      cc1-9943  [001]  2802.059479616: sched_stat_wait: task: as:9944 wait: 2801938766276 [ns]
    
    That nsec field is not supposed to be that large. More digging
    is needed - but lets turn it off while the real bug is found.
    Reported-by: default avatarNikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
    Tested-by: default avatarNikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
    Reported-by: default avatarJens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarJens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
    LKML-Reference: <4AA93D34.8040500@arcor.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    3f2aa307
sched_features.h 482 Bytes