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

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 21:23, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Tom Sightler <ttsig@tuxyturvy.com> 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.
>[...]
> From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
> 
> the patch below fixes George's setiathome problems (as expected).  It
> essentially turns off Linus' improvement, but i dont think it can be fixed
> sanely.
> 
> the problem with setiathome is that it displays something every now and
> then - so it gets a backboost from X, and hovers at a relatively high
> priority.

This fixes the starvation I was getting with xmms visualizers, which
have a similar usage pattern: they're mostly CPU-bound, but they talk to
the X server for drawing.

	J