Re: Desktop Kernel Stuff

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jeff,

On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 02:24, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> So, let's build ourselves a list. :-) Which kernel issues are important to
> GNOME, at a technical level? Which kernel issues are important to GNOME
> users? I'll summarise, and take it to the streets.

	My pet beef is seek time (within which I include rotational delay, not
just head movement incidentally). On login my CPU is mostly idle while
the disk kicks itself to death.

	There are several potential solutions; probably the best is the kernel
tracking / recording per-process disk access patterns, and doing more
intelligent, speculative, batch elevated read-ahead - if that makes any
sense.

	Also - on the swap side; better paging - not knowing how the algorithm
works (and being none the wiser for having read the docs) - I'll waffle:
It seems that a more chunky approach for page recovery geared with
preferentially heavily penalising single processes; may well work much
better than what's currently there for desktop machines.

	Simply recognising and optimising for the use-case of a series of
single process being run for several minutes before switching to another
single process, rather than myriad interleaved concurrent transactions
all of which have to be fairly balanced would be most useful.

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot