From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 References: <200603081013.44678.kernel@kolivas.org> <200603081322.02306.kernel@kolivas.org> <1141784834.767.134.camel@mindpipe> <200603081330.56548.kernel@kolivas.org> Message-ID: From: Con Kolivas Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: yield during swap prefetching Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 14:05:37 +1100 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="=_mimegpg-kolivas.org-19235-1141787137-0001"; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: =?ISO-8859-1?B?QW5kcuk=?= Goddard Rosa Cc: Lee Revell , Andrew Morton , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, ck@vds.kolivas.org List-ID: This is a MIME GnuPG-signed message. If you see this text, it means that your E-mail or Usenet software does not support MIME signed messages. --=_mimegpg-kolivas.org-19235-1141787137-0001 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Mime-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by mimegpg Andr=E9 Goddard Rosa writes: > [...] >> > > Because being a serious desktop operating system that we are >> > > (bwahahahaha) means the user should not have special privileges to ru= n >> > > something as simple as a game. Games should not need special scheduli= ng >> > > classes. We can always use 'nice' for a compile though. Real time aud= io >> > > is a completely different world to this. > [...] >> Well as I said in my previous reply, games should _not_ need special >> scheduling classes. They are not written in a real time smart way and the= y do >> not have any realtime constraints or requirements. > > Sorry Con, but I have to disagree with you on this. > > Games are very complex software, involving heavy use of hardware resources > and they also have a lot of time constraints. So, I think they should > use RT priorities > if it is necessary to get the resources needed in time. Excellent, I've opened the can of worms. Yes, games are a in incredibly complex beast. No they shouldn't need real time scheduling to work well if they are coded properly. However, witness the fact that most of our games are windows ports, therefore being lower quality than the original. Witness also the fact that at last with dual core support, lots and lots (but not all) of windows games on _windows_ are having scheduling trouble and jerky playback,= forcing them to crappily force binding to one cpu. As much as I'd love to blame windows, it is almost certainly due to the coding of the application since better games don't exhibit this problem. Now the games in question can't be trusted to even run on SMP; do you really think they could cope with good real time code? Good -complex- real time coding is very difficult.= If you take any game out there that currently exists and throw real time scheduling at it, almost certainly it will hang the machine. No, I don't believe games need realtime scheduling to work well; they just need to be written well and the kernel needs to be unintrusive enough to work well with= them. Otherwise gaming would have needed realtime scheduling from day one on all operating systems. Generic kernel activities should not cause game stuttering either as users have little control over them. I do expect users to not run too many userspace programs while trying to play games though. I do not believe we should make games work well in the presence of updatedb running for example. Cheers, Con --=_mimegpg-kolivas.org-19235-1141787137-0001 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQBEDkoBZUg7+tp6mRURAoszAJ92VIxqHRxyBVfHfIY7KUxBDGMzDgCfWsrt ABs88x3ldlS0BZE8WKrM110= =q1Ii -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=_mimegpg-kolivas.org-19235-1141787137-0001-- -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org