Re: dynamic sched timeslices

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 11:42:01PM +0100, Kurt Garloff wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> attached patch allows userspace to tune the scheduling timeslices.
> It can be used for a couple of things:
> * Tune a workload for batch processing:
>   You'd probably wnat to use long timeslices in order to not reschedule
>   as often to make good use of your CPU caches
> * Tune a workload for interactive use:
>   Under load, you may want to reduce the scedulilng latencies by using
>   shorter timeslices (and there are situations where the interactiviy
>   tweak -- even if they were perfect -- can't save you).
> * Tune the ration betweeen maximum and minimum timeslices to make
>   nice much nicer e.g.
> 
> The patch exports /proc/sys/kernel/max_timeslice and min_timeslice,
> unites are us. It also exports HZ (readonly).
> The patch implementes the desktop boot parameter which introduces 
> shorter timeslices.
> 
> Patch is from andrea and is in our 2.4 tree; 2.6 port was done by me and
> straightforward. 

Remove the silly desktop boot parameter and the patch looks basically
okay to me.

I remember we had a more complete patch to allow tuning the scheduler
through sysctls in -mm once, though.  Questions is why that one wasn't
merged and if the same reasons apply to a 'light' version.