Re: Bad interactive behaviour in 2.5.65-66 (sched.c)

[Tom Sightler]

On Sun, 2003-03-30 at 00:23, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Tom Sightler <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > On my system I get a starvation issue with just about any CPU intensive
> > task.  For example if create a bzip'd tar file from the linux kernel
> > source with the command:
> > 
> > tar cvp linux | bzip2 -9 > linux.tar.bz2
> > 
> 
> Ingo has determined that Linus's backboost trick is causing at least some
> of these problems. Please test and report upon the below patch.

OK, this definitely makes a big difference for my test cases which
include that 'tar' above as well as a run of dvd::rip.  Without this
patch everything else on my system drops to a total crawl, especially
which dvd::rip is running, dvd::rip itself won't even switch tabs.  With
this patch everything seems quite normal and snappy.

I'll try a few more test cases but backing this out certainly seems to
restore the system to the same behavior as 2.5.64.  BTW, I'm running
this on 2.5.65-mm4.  I would have tested on 2.5.66-mm1 but for some
reason my system locks solid after only a few minutes with it.  I
haven't tried to track that down yet.

Later,
Tom