Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 25 Mar 2012 13:33:16 +1100 | Subject | Re: [ANNOUNCE] BFS CPU scheduler version 0.420 AKA "Smoking" for linux kernel 3.3.0 | From | Con Kolivas <> |
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On 25 March 2012 13:05, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote: > On Sat, 24 Mar 2012 05:53:32 -0400, Gene Heskett said: > >> I for one am happy to see this, Con. I have been running an earlier patch >> as pclos applies it to 2.6.38.8, and I must say the desktop interactivity >> is very much improved over the non-bfs version. > > I'va always wondered what people are using to measure interactivity. Do we have > some hard numbers from scheduler traces, or is it a "feels faster"? And if > it's a subjective thing, how are people avoiding confirmation bias (where you > decide it feels faster because it's the new kernel and *should* feel faster)? > Anybody doing blinded boots, where a random kernel old/new is booted and the > user grades the performance without knowing which one was actually running? > > And yes, this can be a real issue - anybody who's been a aysadmin for > a while will have at least one story of scheduling an upgrade, scratching it > at the last minute, and then having users complain about how the upgrade > ruined performance and introduced bugs... >
I would say the vast majority of -ck/BFS users rely purely on subjective feeling. On the other hand I have done numerous benchmarks in the past trying to show the bound latencies of bfs are better than mainline on regular workloads which is not surprising since BFS is deterministic with respect to its latencies whereas mainline is not (except on uniprocessor). I also documented interbench numbers showing worst case latencies are bound better with BFS but since interbench is a complicated benchmark that also displays fairness, most people don't know how to read the values. Since I was never out to displace the mainline scheduler but to demonstrate alternatives and provide a standard for comparison I didn't bother with the benchmarks much further than the occasional one I've posted. Since the main mailing list seems distinctly disinterested in said results, I've only published the throughput benchmarks as a kind of baseline regression point to show that BFS' throughput is not significantly adversely affected on the commodity hardware that people are using it on.
A comprehensive comparison of (an earlier BFS) compared to CFS and the old O(1) scheduler evaluating throughput and fairness was in the excellent thesis by Joseph T. Meehean entitled "Towards Transparent CPU Scheduling": http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/meehean-thesis11.html
A few of the latency benchmarks that still remain published on my site can be found here: http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/bfs404-cfs/ http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/2.6.35v2.6.35-ck1-interbench.log
Note how old they are. Not much has been done to repeat them since then, but BFS' main design has not drastically changed in that time. Some may be found on the old mailing list posts, but not a lot has been documented with regards to this.
Some throughput benchmarks: http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/benchmark3-results-for-announcement-20110410.txt
Current version: http://s14.postimage.org/4gr5z8nxr/anova_x3360.png http://postimage.org/image/wavusknl1/
Yes the results are from relatively simple benchmarks and limited in scope. Yes there is hardly a decent benchmark for either interactivity or responsiveness (interbench and contest were my attempt to benchmark both of those). Here's my very brief summary of the difference between interactivity and responsiveness as I see it that I wrote many years ago: http://ck.kolivas.org/readme.interactivity
Regards, Con -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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