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Debating the Linux Process Scheduler

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:22 AM
from the little-from-column-a-little-from-column-b dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Linux 2.6.23 kernel is expected around the end of the month, and will be the first to include Ingo Molnar's much debated rewrite of the process scheduler called the Completely Fair Scheduler. In another Linux kernel mailing list thread one more developer is complaining about Molnar and his new code. However, according to KernelTrap a number of other Linux developers have stood up to defend Molnar and call into question the motives of the complaints. It will be interesting to see how the new processor really performs when the 2.6.23 kernel is released."

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  • Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Friday September 14, @11:27AM (#20604637)
    Is someone who does understand the differences able to explain, in non-kernel-developer terms, what the big differences will be for the average user, developer or administrator? I mean, I'd love to discuss it, but first of all I'd want to know what we're discussing.
    • I'd love to discuss it, but first of all I'd want to know what we're discussing.

      That's not the Slashdot way. We're supposed to have an unfounded opinion based on insufficient facts and preexisting prejudices.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Aladrin (926209) on Friday September 14, @11:40AM (#20604865)
      Average? Probably nothing. But for devs/admins that are worried about certain processes taking more time than others, it -should- be more fair and keep things running smoother.

      It's possible for programs right now to exploit how the current schedule dishes out time. As far as I know, they currently only do so out of ignorance, rather than malice. The new scheduler just corrects the problem.

      It's not something a user can really see unless they know exactly what they are looking for, and unless a dev/admin has a program that's behaving unfairly, it's not really going to matter to them, either.

      There is another invisible effect as well... Kolivas apparently publicly announced his decision to stop working on the kernel, which would include the current scheduler. That means finding another maintainer for his code, should any problems surface. If you've got 2 pieces of code that test the same in speed (as they do according to some), and 1 has a dev that's willing to keep working on it, and the other doesn't... Which would you pick?

      The new code also has the added advantage of being a really really neat idea, which encourages people to work on it as well.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Opportunist (166417) on Friday September 14, @12:07PM (#20605259)
        That sounds sensible. With the increase of Linux boxes run by "average" people (who will not directly notice a difference), the threat of malware for Linux is going to be on the rise, too. And those people usually know how to exploit even the smallest flaws in a system.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by the_B0fh (Score:1) Friday September 14, @12:31PM
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ciroknight (601098) on Friday September 14, @12:34PM (#20605629)
        Kolivas apparently publicly announced his decision to stop working on the kernel, which would include the current scheduler. That means finding another maintainer for his code, should any problems surface. If you've got 2 pieces of code that test the same in speed (as they do according to some), and 1 has a dev that's willing to keep working on it, and the other doesn't... Which would you pick?

        Wow, not even a full year has past and we're already getting revisionist historians trying to change the situation.

        Kolivas quit because of the scheduler debacle, because nobody would listen to Kolivas but were apt to follow Linus and his cronie Ingo around when they drum up more-or-less the exact same thing. Instead of critically listening to Kolivas' points, Linus and Ingo attacked Kolivas' merits. Under that kind of personal attack, I couldn't say I wouldn't have quit just to shut them up. Not all of us are stubborn mules and jackasses.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Informative)

          by peragrin (659227) on Friday September 14, @12:56PM (#20605933)
          What goes around comes around.

          Revisionist history is working both ways I see. Whenever Linux or another kernel developer would bring up a point of failure in Kolvias's scheduler instead of Fixing the problem Kolvias would lash out and say it wasn't broken.

          CFS won not because it was a better scheduler at the time, but because Inglo worked with the developers to make it better, instead of fighting everyone who questioned anything about it. FOSS projects are about helping everyone, and listening to new Ideas. Something Kolvias was having a hard time doing.

          That is at least how i read the whole debate.
          [ Parent ]
          • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by SEAL (88488) on Friday September 14, @01:07PM (#20606079)
            Whenever Linux or another kernel developer would bring up a point of failure in Kolvias's scheduler instead of Fixing the problem Kolvias would lash out and say it wasn't broken.

            CFS won not because it was a better scheduler at the time, but because Inglo worked with the developers to make it better, instead of fighting everyone who questioned anything about it.


            I believe Linus was the claiming Ingo worked better with the developers (or at least I saw him write to that effect on the LKML). By contrast, Kolivas had many individuals helping out with his branch who were quite pleased with his progress.

            The problem is that Kolivas was working to help desktop, and particularly 3D game users. He'd say it wasn't broken if it was optimizing for those particular platforms at a cost of a fraction of a percent Oracle performance. Most of the kernel devs don't care 2 cents about 3D or desktop users, and many are employed by large enterprise businesses, so you can see who won.

            Personally I think Kolivas should've been given full access to merge his code. Many of us found his work very useful and it's sad to see him driven away by a few people who are oblivious to what everyday users need. Even if his scheduler was not the default one, it still would've been nice to have as a mainline kernel option.

            - SEAL
            [ Parent ]
          • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by recoiledsnake (879048) on Friday September 14, @01:08PM (#20606089)

            CFS won not because it was a better scheduler at the time, but because Inglo worked with the developers to make it better, instead of fighting everyone who questioned anything about it.

            That was certainly not how I read it when it happened. I came off with the impression that Kolivas was ripped off of his ideas by Inglo and that Linus was wrong in brushing Inglo off and going with Inglo.

            The LKML email linked reinforces my suspicion. Habits and attitudes don't die easily. We see ANOTHER guy complaining that his patch was half bakedly ripped off with no explanations whatsoever and a tangential acknowledgement.

            FOSS projects are about helping everyone, and listening to new Ideas. Something Kolvias was having a hard time doing.

            Did you even read the linked email? Inglo seems to be talking in patches and with no discussion. If something were to happen to him or if he quits due to any reason, there would be no one who would understand the code and the features behind it enough to maintain it.

            [ Parent ]
          • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by Opportunist (Score:3) Friday September 14, @01:09PM
          • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by makomk (Score:2) Saturday September 15, @07:18AM
          • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by Wdomburg (Score:3) Friday September 14, @01:07PM
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by GooberToo (74388) on Friday September 14, @01:19PM (#20606253)
        Average? Probably nothing.

        I don't think that's really fair. Average these days actually has a large spread. Average web user? Average game player? Average video watcher? Average musician? Averaging what? And that's the point of the CFS. Each of those users have different expectations and each reflect a different type of scheduler workload. The old scheduler has lots and lots of code to handle various performance problems for corner cases for each type of "average user" depicted above. This in turn means the code is hard to read, hard to understand, and even harder to maintain. Worse, some code which help some corner cases actually make things worse for others. This in turn means more special case coding and even more complex testing.

        The CFS is designed to simplify most everything the O(1) schedule does without tons of complex heuristics and special code to address various corner cases. In other words, in stead of trying to guess what you really want, the CFS simply tries to be as fair as possible for everyone, thusly ensuring many categories of corner cases are simply no longer an issue with the CFS.

        This does not mean CFS is always better than O(1), but early results indicate they are traveling down a good road. In fact, the last round of patches I read about, actually establish CFS ~12% faster then the old O(1) schedule. Of course, it's yet to be seen how well it will be received and how quickly it will prove it self with a large user base. The devil is in the details with schedulers and sometimes real world user workloads don't reflect anything which has been tested/validating during development.

        Nonetheless, development on CFS continues and it certainly is providing hope it will be smaller, faster, provide lower latency, be easier to maintain, and address a wider range of workloads, including many corner cases, without requiring complex code to track and analyze heuristics.

        Long story short, yes, if all goes well, even the average user may notice an improvement depending on the particulars of their workload. Wouldn't you notice a more responsive desktop? ;)

        [ Parent ]
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by Nosklo (Score:1) Friday September 14, @11:40AM
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by poetmatt (Score:1) Friday September 14, @11:50AM
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zephiris (788562) on Friday September 14, @11:50AM (#20605013)
      (http://www.dragoon-project.net/)
      Essentially, the difference is how well processor resources are divided up, how evenly, and how big the pieces are each process or task gets. Most anyone who has used Linux has had the dreaded moment where you're trying to multitask a bit, and are compiling a program while listening to music, or waching a video, and then...that's terrific, video frames are dropped, or the audio skips. Even if intermitant, it's quite annoying, at the very least. The 'Completely Fair Scheduler' is an attempt to have more fair, sane, and generally less complex scheduling. This also happens to reduces the worst case latencies, averaging from (at least on the tests with my computer) 120+ms on vanilla 2.6.22 scheduler, to ~2.6ms with CFS.

      It's largely a drastic improvement over the old scheduling mechanisms that Linux has relied on, although other OSes have largely worked through such problems some time ago.

      While it's not exactly THE most scientific, I had a few rounds of testing over which did better on load vs. things still behaving exactly the way they should. I ran all of them with audio playing through KDE artsd, video player, glxgears, etc, loaded, plus inducing a CPU load via 'stress'. Linux, even with CFS, it's still fairly easy to 'upset' it by just producing a fairly large (2-4) amount of load. Solaris did notably better. While it seemed to have a few quirks with scheduling in general, it could sustain a load of around 8-12 without producing video/audio frame drops. FreeBSD, with the experimental SCHED_ULE 2.0 scheduler (as of March 2007) could sustain a load of over 80 with no problems, frame drops, or even glxgears slowing down to a complete crawl (although you wouldn't want to especially use OpenGL at such, it was still getting the speed of software glxgears), and even at 120+ load, the mouse wouldn't respond, while everything else kept going fine. This seems purely useless, but it really comes in handy if trying to do one or more KDE compiles while watching video, on Linux, this tends to be prevented. For the uninitiated, load averages like that are basically a multiplier vs. how much actual work your computer can do in real time. Eg, a 0.5 load would mean you're doing 50% of what you could in realtime. A 2.0 load means you're trying to handle twice what you can do in realtime, it is weighted against how many processors you have (I have one), but other things like disk access can also contribute to the load average, depending on OS.

      So, longer story short, a superior CPU scheduler can make a world of difference in how things behave when your system's something else with the CPU(s) at the same time.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by FauxPasIII (Score:3) Friday September 14, @11:53AM
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by MajinBlayze (Score:1) Friday September 14, @12:25PM
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mamer (536310) on Friday September 14, @12:36PM (#20605669)
        Another question: I've been waiting for OpenMP support in gcc, it seems to be coming soon. In the meantime, I tried to parallelize my code by hard coding my threads using pthreads. I tested it by running several matrix-matrix multiplications "in parallel" on a multi-core CPU, and what I've got was all threads running on the same processor. Only after increasing my number of threads to a couple of dozens, I get some of them to run on the second processor. So basically, I am not getting any performance gain. I asked a number of people an they tell me "this is an old problem, basically the Linux kernel scheduler is stupid and nobody has bothered to fix it". Now, is Ingo's new scheduler fixing this? if gcc-openmp relies on the kernel scheduler, should we expect that open-mp will basically work-but-not-really-work on shared memory multi processor machines? I think this is an important issue to address, especially in an era where high-performace computing has become the driving force behind the hardware. BTW, how are otehr commercial compilers overcoming this scheduling problem?
        [ Parent ]
      • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by fastest fascist (Score:2) Friday September 14, @02:11PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • fairness and interactivity by Chirs (Score:2) Friday September 14, @12:01PM
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dpilot (134227) on Friday September 14, @12:30PM (#20605585)
      (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 12 2005, @09:37AM)
      Do you want your media to play without skips or drops while you're compiling your new kernel?

      There have long been tricks like "interactive priority boost" or "nice -10 X" that attempt to make the desktop more responsive, and media play smoothly. But others believe those are just tricks, bound to misbehave in corner cases, and that a good scheduler and well implemented priority scheme will do just as well without the drawbacks. That's where CFS is trying to be. In particular most desktop responsiveness is of the sort, "I need a little CPU, and I need it NOW!" while compiles and such are "I need lots of CPU, and I'll take it whenever I can get it." The CFS keeps track of not just who's using a timeslice, but how much time they're using. That way, those short bursts of CPU keep their priority intact, while more CPU-intensive processes tend to get some priority degradation.

      This goes back a little farther than Ingo Molnar's current involvement. A while back, Con Kolivas began putting in a bunch of work on the scheduler trying to get desktop response to work right, essentially he wanted his media, and his compiles, too. He did a lot of work and attracted a lot of users and fanbois along the way. More recently, Ingo Molnar get interested too, and came up with the "Completely Fair Scheduler." When it came time to pick one, Linus saw the CFS doing pretty well, still under heavy and active development. CK's scheduler was also pretty good, but the fanbois poisoned the waters, insisting that it was perfect as it was, and didn't need fixing. Linux chose an active development model over "perfection." Unfortunately Con Kolivas felt slighted in the process, and left. IIRC, he may have been absent during the decision window, and his fanbois did him in.

      Add to all of this the fact that the kernel can now run tickless, so that laptops can really scale back their power in between keystrokes or while you're reading the screen. There has been quite a bit of interesting work on scheduling, lately.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by WhiteWolf666 (Score:3) Friday September 14, @12:51PM
    • Re:Can someone provide some insight? by bgspence (Score:1) Saturday September 15, @03:27AM
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • In a blind taste test.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by budword (680846) on Friday September 14, @11:29AM (#20604673)
    I doubt any of us could tell the difference. Storm in a tea cup.
    • Re:In a blind taste test.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MyLongNickName (822545) on Friday September 14, @11:40AM (#20604867)
      (Last Journal: Saturday October 14 2006, @08:12AM)
      As a windows user who has very little experience with Windows: This is one of the strengths of open source. if you have a large enough base of contributors, these "little" details are brought out into the open, and you can really understand how things work. I've read a bit on the subject, and it is interesting to see the different approaches that can be taken to something that most of us do not even think about.

      With Windows, how does this work? I will never know for sure. if MS doesn't choose to make it known, it isn't known. If they choose to make it known, then I just have to trust they are telling the truth (Windows Update anyone).

      With a project like this, you are much more likely to get the best approach to the situation.
      [ Parent ]
    • Esoteric Discussions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Archangel Michael (180766) on Friday September 14, @11:45AM (#20604939)
      (Last Journal: Wednesday September 22 2004, @11:13AM)
      More importantly, if there are more than one Scheduler, and if someone could tell the difference, why isn't s/he using the ALTERNATE Scheduler and compiling their own custom, tweaked and totally tuned kernel?

      Seriously, most people aren't going to notice, and those that do notice, ought to be able to compile their own kernel, and ought to do exactly that. This is nothing short of an esoteric discussion and shouldn't extend beyond kernel developers. Most people don't know, and don't care which scheduler is implemented.

      I'm one of those somewhere between caring and not. I only care about the supposed differences in approach to scheduling, and quite frankly, from what little I understand, the various schemes to scheduling have their advantages and disadvantages. I seriously doubt that ONE is better in all circumstances compared to all the others.

      [ Parent ]
    • Re:In a blind taste test.... by morgan_greywolf (Score:2) Friday September 14, @12:19PM
    • Re:In a blind taste test.... by DohnJoe (Score:1) Friday September 14, @01:03PM
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • by RightSaidFred99 (874576) on Friday September 14, @11:30AM (#20604683)
    When Nerds Attack 3: The Nerdening.
  • more important things (Score:1, Insightful)

    by LM741N (258038) on Friday September 14, @11:35AM (#20604771)
    I know its not easy getting info on wireless chips, but time would be better spent working on something like that. Just look at all the live CD's out there and how many can connect to wifi? Ubuntu and not much else. (note to self- take wifi chip developers out to strip club and get them drunk next time they are in town)
  • by ishmalius (153450) on Friday September 14, @11:42AM (#20604913)
    That was a very entertaining read. I love it when strong personalities squabble, and egos collide. Open Source is Fun!
  • Still don't understand the fixation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14, @11:44AM (#20604931)
    Another CFS flamewar within 2 weeks of the last slashdot article on it.
    http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/01/1853228 [slashdot.org]

    And yet the most important performance bugs in the kernel haven't had any updates.
    http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372 [kernel.org]
    http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8636 [kernel.org]

    I do not understand the fixation on CPU scheduling when there are so many other things that need attention. [Heck, if disk IO performance is so broken, I certainly don't have the guts to try out the new firewire code in 2.6.22 as well and add another variable into my life.]
  • Just fork it (Score:2)

    by zymano (581466) on Friday September 14, @11:47AM (#20604973)
    And find out which ones better.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Ugh bring back 2.7 please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maelstrom (638) on Friday September 14, @12:03PM (#20605197)
    (http://hivearchive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday March 07 2002, @10:39PM)
    I know they've changed the model of development for the kernel, but how many new schedulers have we gone through between 2.4 and 2.6 now? Maybe it is just me, but the scheduler seems like a pretty important piece of the kernel.... Ripping it out every 6 months and calling it "stable" seems a bit off to me.

    Oh well. I guess I'm just getting cranky in my "old" age.
  • by denisbergeron (197036) <DenisBergeron@@@yahoo...com> on Friday September 14, @12:07PM (#20605255)
    Why not having the possibility to choose the sheduler ? What about a modular kernel sheduler, so everyone will be happy.
  • For example, ReactOS had a flamewar regarding the "stolen code from Windows", and it was nearly identical. There was this obsessive guy that got fed up over nothing just because his pride as a person was hurt. In the end he was just misinterpreting stuff. The other guy tried to be calm and understanding, but it didn't work.

    In the end, it's just about one thing: Some developers, no matter how high their IQ is, are too full of themselves because they have a stupid complex and a low self-esteem.
  • Why wait? (Score:2)

    by ruiner13 (527499) on Friday September 14, @12:13PM (#20605347)
    (http://www.exacttarget.com/)

    It will be interesting to see how the new processor really performs when the 2.6.23 kernel is released."
    Why would you have to wait? Couldn't someone just grab the source, compile it, and benchmark it? Yes, it may have bugs, but it should at least give an indication of overall speed.
  • BEOS scheduler? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Danathar (267989) on Friday September 14, @12:19PM (#20605451)
    (Last Journal: Sunday August 20 2006, @09:16PM)
    Does anybody know what kind of scheduler BEOS used before it's demise? I seem to recall it ran circles around other OS's at the time when it came to multitasking multimedia.
  • by drolli (522659) on Friday September 14, @12:45PM (#20605791)

    -Emacs vs. vi
    -Reiderfs vs. ext3 (obsolete)
    -GPLv3 vs GPLv2
    -GPL vs BSD ....

    and now:

    Scheduler wars!
  • It may be time for Linux development to split. One fork will focus on stable code that works like a UNIX, and the other in forging new boundaries. I think the FreeBSD developers did something simple.

    There is a good reason for this. When you want to make something stable, you want to take proven ideas and refine them so you can make guarantees.

    But for our hacker souls, and our inner adventurers, we also need something that is determined to break new ground and make no guarantees. The CFS is being justified by performance, or administrative reasons, but why not focus instead on the real reason we'd like to see it happen?

    It's a cool idea to play with.

    We're primates. Play is how we learn and invent. Keep pushing upward, making the code do new things and taking on new challenges, because the hacker spirit is play. That playfulness has brought us most of our thinking outside the box, good inventions. Keep it up. Aim for the stars.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • You know, its funny, but, OSS people, and the academic world in general, since they work for peanuts, if not free, are really big into having their names attached to things that they did.

    I wonder how much of a troll it would be, if one were to make a math book that took out all the names of all the people, renamed everything based on descriptive terminology, and just made some part of science a faceless API, like so much a Windows SDK reference or C# help.
  • by fitten (521191) on Friday September 14, @01:28PM (#20606351)
    On a server, you want the different server tasks to have fair access (usually, this isn't always the case) to the processor so that all the server stuff can go on smoothly.

    On a personal workstation, however, an interactive user doesn't necessarily want all the programs to have fair access... we typically would like to have what we're concentrating on currently to be more responsive (have potentially unfair access) or else we may see dropped frames, stuttering music, or the like because the scheduler is trying to be fair to applications that aren't interactive with the console user.

    This is the battle that was going on... one claims that Linux process scheduling methodologies were being swayed too far by the interests of admin for servers and this was compromising the single-user in front of a desktop experience.

    What probably needs to happen is to have multiple schedulers or, at least, one where you can set the behaviour at runtime to be either more fair (server type machine) or more responsive to user tasks (desktop type machine).
  • Scheduler Question for the /. Experts (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cassini2 (956052) on Friday September 14, @01:52PM (#20606633)

    One way to cause dramatic performance problems on a Windows machine is to simply write a program that accesses lots of files. Performing a network backup with the Windows Networking API is a good example of this. Windows responds by fetching the files from disk and using system memory as a cache. In the process, the working set of programs running on the computer is paged out. The result is that low-priority activities can dramatically slow down potentially important activities on the computer. A good example of this is doing a network backup or a background virus scan on a Windows computer while trying to do any foreground activity (like browsing the web or using Microsoft Word).

    So far, in my experience, Linux seems pretty immune to these priority inversions. Will the new scheduling algorithms allow low-priority processes to cause priority inversions by abusing non-processor resources like the network or disk drives?

  • by tota (139982) on Friday September 14, @02:31PM (#20607245)
    (http://nagafix.co.uk/)
    The discussion is not as bad as it sounds (almost normal for LKML!), it's just that Roman wants to talk about the maths and Ingo works with patches... as Willy Tarreau pointed out "I know for sure that the common language here on LKML is patches".

    Beyond the heated discussion with Roman Zippel, there are still a few workloads which can trigger regressions, one of which I found running some unit tests.

    This is covered in this thread [kerneltrap.org], and although there is now a version of CFS which does not exhibit the problem (see graph of combo3-yield patch [devloop.org.uk]) it is not the one that is meant to be merged in 2.6.23 (these patches are 2.6.24 material) so Ingo is getting me to test patches until this regression can be solved.

    One slightly annoying thing is that the current fix involves using sysctl to switch back (at least partially) to the old scheduler mechanism!
  • by 12357bd (686909) on Friday September 14, @02:42PM (#20607451)

    that Ingo takes the work/ideas of others about the scheduler and presents his own implementation without proper reconnaisance or collaboration.

    As the main responsable of the kernel, don't you think that something has to be done? At the current state I (as a developer) would not try to contribute to such a personally 'monopolized' project, that's sad.

  • Gross mis-characterizations of Molnar (Score:4, Informative)

    by l4m3z0r (799504) <kevin&uberstyle,net> on Friday September 14, @03:46PM (#20608739)

    As I started reading the comments on here I noticed that many were quick to down Ingo for his transgressions and its quite obvious from the comments that no one has bothered to read the exchange on LKML in order to become familiar with what is going on. I have read it, I have 0 bias for either Zippel or Molnar and I can say without any reservation that Zippel is a wank and Molnar is borderline saintly.

    A recap of what I have read and understood about the entire situation:

    • Zippel shows up with some patches out of the blue and makes some claims about them.
    • Molnar takes time out of his day to look at and understand the patches and points out a few things such as lack of comments and missing functionality, also points out that some of the things Zippel wants to do have been done since the last time Zippel looked at the code and that he should look into the latest they've done.
    • At this point Zippel decides to try to get into a pissing contest with Molnar and makes more claims about the superiority of his math and how the patches aren't the point.
    • They argue back and forth all the while Molnar very seriously considering and understanding Zippels concerns. Molnar asks Zippel to split up his giant patch into smaller pieces that are commented and cleaned in order to bring the useful ones into the kernel more easily.
    • Zippel essentially whines and repeats the same arguments over and over for a bunch of threads.
    • Molnar basically pleads for him to cooperate so CFS can get the benefits Zippel has to offer.
    • Zippel refuses, acts like a child.
    • Molnar reworks a few of Zippel's ideas into smaller patches and incorporated them into CFS and attributes this to Zippel.
    • Zippel is very rude about this and accuses Molnar of stealing from Zippel.
    • Molnar again asks him to cooperate.
    • Other people get annoyed start criticizing Zippel.

    Ultimately I think Zippel is purposefully trying to provoke Molnar throughout all of this. His wild accusations are nothing more than games that he is playing, the guy has a chip on his shoulder and if Linux was my toy, I would have blocked him from the mailing lists.

  • Re:Snooze (Score:5, Funny)

    by Reason58 (775044) on Friday September 14, @11:35AM (#20604785)

    Seriously has Slashdot got such a boner for Linux that they'll post absolutely every fucking little boring thing they find?
    You must be new here.
    [ Parent ]
    • Re:Snooze by EricR86 (Score:2) Friday September 14, @11:55AM
      • Re:Snooze (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday September 14, @12:56PM (#20605953)
        (http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
        Maybe I missed them, but where were all of the Slashdot articles about the ULE 2 and ULE 3 FreeBSD schedulers? From all the benchmarks I've seen, they make the Linux scheduler look embarrassingly antiquated (performance characteristics matching the 4BSD scheduler that ULE was originally designed to replace).
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Snooze by oojah (Score:3) Friday September 14, @03:46PM
    • Re:Snooze by revengebomber (Score:1) Friday September 14, @01:36PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Re:Snooze (Score:2)

    by monkeySauce (562927) on Friday September 14, @11:54AM (#20605075)
    (Last Journal: Monday November 13 2006, @01:52PM)
    Well, we've got to get boners for something, and girls are too elusive.
    [ Parent ]
  • There is no debate (Score:2)

    by SpaceLifeForm (228190) on Friday September 14, @12:32PM (#20605619)
    Real world benchmarks will decide.

    [ Parent ]
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by Daimanta (1140543) on Friday September 14, @01:30PM (#20606383)


    FP!

    [ Parent ]
  • 14 replies beneath your current threshold.