ULE patch, call for testers

[David Xu]

On 2012/11/03 02:26, Jeff Roberson wrote:
> I have a small patch to the ULE scheduler that makes a fairly large
> change to the way timeshare threads are handled.
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~jeff/schedslice.diff
>
> Previously ULE used a fixed slice size for all timeshare threads.  Now
> it scales the slice size down based on load.  This should reduce latency
> for timeshare threads as load increases.  It is important to note that
> this does not impact interactive threads.  But when a thread transitions
> to interactive from timeshare it should see some improvement.  This
> happens when something like Xorg chews up a lot of CPU.
>
> If anyone has perf tests they'd like to run please report back.  I have
> done a handful of validation.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff

Another problem I remembered is that a thread on runqueue may be starved
because ULE treats a sleeping thread and a thread waiting on runqueue
differently. If a thread has slept for a while, after it is woken up,
its priority is boosted, but for a thread on runqueue, its priority
will never be boosted. In essential, they should be same becase both of
them are waiting for cpu. If I am a thread, I'd like to wait on sleep
queue rather than on runqueue, since in former case, I will get
bonus, while in later case, I'll get nothing. Under heavy load,
there are many runnable threads, this unfair can cause a very low 
priority thread on runqueue to be starved. 4BSD seems not suffer from
this problem, because it also decay cpu time of thread on runqueue.
I think ULE needs some anti-starvation code to give thread a shot
if it is waiting on runqueue too long time.

Regards,
David Xu