Re: Is it bad to have lots of sleeping tasks?

[Alan Cox]

> So why not do it?  Or implement a nicer scheduler?  There are many good
> ones.  There are o(1) schedulers that provide much better proportional
> sharing.  They scale and also perform well even in "few running processes"
> case.  They are also not hard to implement (I once implemented such a
> scheduler with 100 lines of patch, and that fitted in the existing Linux
> runqueue framework).  What's the resistence to scheduler changes?

The resistance I've seen has been to schedulers that perform more poorly
with < 3 running processes - that being the normal case.

Its also suprisingly hard to find a very simple scheduler that provides
fairness and cache optimal behaviour while working well SMP. Uniprocessor
is easy, uniprocessor with real time isnt too bad, SMP gets tricky.

I'd definitely like to see a better scheduler in the kernel, providing its
as fast for the < 3 processes case too.

Alan