so decided to do a kernel upgrade, not liking any patchset, i thought i would slap some patches on a kernel, and pray it works.

so the question i have, what do you guys think of the CPU schedulers for the desktop ?, ill be using my computer for desktop mainly (some work with video/audio like stuff to), and was wondering if i should use staircase or O(1), or a different scheduler i never heard of?, normally i would use both, and see for myself, but the staircase patch is having trouble with rt-preemtion patch, so i want to save me some work, and only see if i can get them working if staircase really is better.

EDIT : I just saw that you were talking about CPU schedulers, not IO schedulers. So perhaps I'm being offtopic.


I use CFQ (completely fair queued) and it's a very good choice for a multimedia desktop. You'll find it in Con Koliva's patchset. Don't worry, you don't need to apply the other patches. Note that all versions of -ck don't have the same stability. Usually versions with a large number (eg -ck6, -ck7) are much more reliable than early versions for each kernel. I have 2.6.10-ck7 and I'm very happy with it. Though I haven't tried vanilla schedulers for a long time. Perhaps they're just as good...

i also use CFQ, its the best for a desktop IMHO, i used to compile things, during the install phase, it sucks up a lot of hard drive resources, with the default IO sched, if i also played music, id get quite a few xruns (skips/pauses), with CFQ, i can compile 5 things at once, and play music with no xruns ..... not 1. CFQ is the way to go if you want smooth performance for your desktop.

and I'm also using a lot of the patches from the ck tree.

also, does your desktop feel more responsive under the ck sources (as they use staircase)?

I'm not sure if I understand : what do you mean by "the ck sources use staircase" ?

The CFQ is the default I/O scheduler in CK, but I do not know at all what CPU scheduler I am using. How can I know that?

Anyway, I have applied the full CK patchset and my experience is similar to yours : my desktop is always very responsive, even under high load.

the Staircase CPU sched is the CPU sched for the ck tree, its said to make programs more responsive, but last time i used it, i didn't notice a thing, i was wondering if people did notice a difference between the 2 CPU sched, as far as desktop performance is concerned.