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[20161222]
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Bringing the scheduler saga to the finishing line  
After my last
blog postings on the NetBSD scheduler,
some time went by. What has happened that the code 
to handle process migration was rewritten to give 
more knobs for tuning, and some testing was done.
The initial problem state 
in PR kern/51615
is solved by the code. 
To reach a wider audience and get more testing,
the code was
committed to NetBSD-current today.
Now, two things remain to be seen:
 
-  More testing. This best involved situations that compare
     the system's behaviour without and with the patch. 
     Situations to test include
     
     -  pure computation jobs that involve multiple parallel processes
     
 -  a mix of CPU-crunching and input/output, again on a number of
          concurrent processes
     
 -  full build.sh examples
     
  
     If you have time and an interesting set of numbers,
     please feel free to
     let us know on tech-kern@..
     
  -  Documentation. There is already a number of undocumented
     sysctls under "kern.sched", which was now extended by one more,
     "average_weight". While it's obvious to add the knob from
     the formula, testing it under various real-life conditions
     and see how things change is left to be determined by
     a PhD thesis or two - be sure to drop us your patches for 
     src/share/man/man7/sysctl.7 
     if you can come up with a comprehensible
     description of all the scheduler sysctls!
  
So just now when you thought there is no more research to be
done in scheduling algorithms, here is your chance 
to fame and glory! :-)
  
[Tags:  scheduler, Xen]
 
  
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