linux-5.9-ck1, MuQSS version 0.204 for linux-5.9

Unfortunately these past few months have been marred by lockdown and family issues, culminating in the ultimate death of my father just over a month ago (unrelated to covid19 but made that much worse because of its effects on everything in our city) so linux kernel was the furthest thing from my mind and a 5.8 resync never happened. He'll be sorely missed, and if this were something more substantial I'd dedicate it towards him but it doesn't do him justice.

Announcing a new -ck release, 5.9-ck1  with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.204 These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload. 

 

This was a massive resync being two versions deep and is only lightly tested so far so take the usual precautions.

linux-5.9-ck1:

-ck1 patch:

patch-5.9-ck1.xz

Git tree:

5.9-ck

MuQSS only:

Download:

5.9-muqss-204.patch

Git tree:

5.9-muqss

Web: http://kernel.kolivas.org

This release is a minor bugfix and resync from 5.7-ck1.

Enjoy!

お楽しみ下さい

-ck

More delays and motivation issues

 Hi all. 

 

Sorry I haven't gotten out a MuQSS and -ck release for linux-5.8. Some of you have been emailing me to check on my well-being in this crazy world. I appreciate the concern, and apart from family issues, I've been fine. It's fair to say that my motivation for keeping up with linux kernel development has been flagging for some time now and the current world situation is not helping. Hearing the news extol the virtues of linux-5.8 being the "biggest release ever" does not particularly aid my situation. If it were just a massive drop of new drivers I could understand that, but usually it just means yet more rewrites of major infrastructure within the kernel in the quest to "make it better." Personally I don't think it's such a great thing, but that's a debate best left for elsewhere. I do plan to stay in sync with 5.8 and future kernel releases, but I'm not sure when I'll be motivated to resume that resyncing process. My biggest concern with the massive churn is me screwing something up in a way that leaves users of my code open to security issues or fatal data corruption at some stage because I haven't been careful enough to protect against this happening. For this reason I've often considered abandoning the code entirely but some supportive individuals have stated they find comfort in the relative stability and continued utility of MuQSS's code in the increasingly volatile kernel churn world which is reassuring and encouraging enough for me to at least plan to stay in sync. 

 

As time goes on and more and more features get added to the scheduler that have nothing to do with ordinary desktop and mobile platform usage, at some stage distributions will be tempted to become dependent on one or more of those features and if I don't develop MuQSS much further to incorporate my own version of those features, it will become redundant. Given the completely different scheduler architecture of MuQSS versus CFS means I can't simply just port over the code most of the time; I have to write my own complete feature equivalent version and these are far from trivial. The accounting code is completely different, most of the CGROUP features aren't even implemented, and deadline scheduling is not available at all for example. If more of these appear in the future and eventually become showstoppers, then unless some miracle happens to make me find the motivation to work on them, it will be the death of it.

Cheers all. Stay safe and well,

-ck

linux-5.7-ck1, MuQSS version 0.202 for linux-5.7

Announcing a new -ck release, 5.7-ck1  with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.202. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.

linux-5.7-ck1:

-ck1 patch:

patch-5.7-ck1.xz

Git tree:

5.7-ck

MuQSS only:

Download:

5.7-muqss-202.patch

Git tree:

5.7-muqss

Web: http://kernel.kolivas.org

This release is a minor bugfix and resync from 5.6-ck2.

Enjoy!

お楽しみ下さい

-ck

linux-5.6-ck2, MuQSS version 0.2 for linux-5.6

Announcing a new -ck release, 5.6-ck2  with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.2. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload. This is a maintenance release to address a build failure on -ck1 when built with full dynticks, and fix some cosmetic CPU load accounting issues. Upgrading is not required unless you are affected by the aforementioned issues or are rebuilding for a new stable release. It's worth pointing out that changing the reported load might have repercussions with how CPU frequency scaling behaves.

linux-5.6-ck2:

-ck2 patch:

patch-5.6-ck2.xz

Git tree:

5.6-ck

MuQSS only:

Download:

5.6-muqss-200.patch

Git tree:

5.6-muqss

Web: http://kernel.kolivas.org


As an aside, it has been brought to my attention that the MESA code uses SCHED_IDLEPRIO for what it considers low priority threads. In the mainline kernel this only makes them lower priority than regular tasks, but on MuQSS which has true idle scheduling, it can potentially lead to stalls under conditions of load. Once a thread has stalled for an extended time, it is possible that it will not progress normally depending on how the code expects to run. This could lead to GUI stalls in applications that use MESA, of which there are quite a few now, such as firefox. I've been considering submitting a change to the MESA code in the hope they approach this differently, but I am a pragmatist and expect the turnaround time and acceptability of the changes may be drawn out and unsatisfactory. So I am considering alternatively softening the idle scheduling and making it configurable to behave more like mainline's by default and optionally be set to be true idle scheduling. In the meantime, I've prepared some hacked mesa packages for those on ubuntu 20.04 variants that disable this behaviour, but this is a cludge only for the time being:

mesa-ubuntu20.04 packages

Here is a much better patch for Mesa that converts threads to nice 19 SCHED_BATCH instead:

0001-Linux-Change-minimum-priority-threads-from-SCHED_IDL.patch


 Enjoy!

お楽しみ下さい

-ck