More Patches To Improve Linux Desktop Responsiveness

[DarkCloud]

This is the kid of fixes I want on my lnux desktop. Over the last five years there has been all kinds of eye candy inprovements, and that's great. But what I really want is stable fast 2D graphics.

As old as X is it is hard to fathom why my windows update so slow as I them drag it around. I suppose a lot of these basic issues are not with X but the companies making the proprietary drivers. Come on AMD and Nvidia lets give a little TLC to X11.

[kimble85]

Very good news indeed! Any chance that some of these fixes will be backported and included in Ubuntu 10.10?

[smitty3268]

I don't get why everyone, including Michael, claims these are desktop improvement patches in the first place.

I'm sure it's because the patches come with this comment:

With this patchset, I got the following results with wakeup-latency.c (a 10ms periodic timer), running periodic-fork.sh, Xorg, make -j3 and firefox (playing a youtube video), with Xorg moving terminal windows around, in parallel on a UP system (links to the test program source in the dyn min_vruntime patch). The Xorg interactivity is very good with the new features enabled, but was poor originally with the vanilla mainline scheduler.

which seems to indicate at least some desktop improvement, under certain cirumstances.

[korpenkraxar]

It seems no one pays attention. These patches were introduced in order to improve performance on server load. Linus Torvalds complained that it damaged desktop performance. So this is round two of those patches: improving server performance while not hurting desktop performance.

I don't get why everyone, including Michael, claims these are desktop improvement patches in the first place. Which is why I don't trust this whole thing, since I care only about desktop issues... Too much misinformation and no real explanation at what these patches do.

Are you saying the new patches do NOT improve desktop performance but makes it worse?

[kraftman]

Are you saying the new patches do NOT improve desktop performance but makes it worse?

If I remember corectly old series of this patches made noticeable latency worse while the measurable latency was better. However, it seems this series should bring improvements to both.

[Ragas]

there are also some patches in the set wich add configure options which seem aimed at desktop responsiveness.

[Yfrwlf]

Finally! There should be more effort put into the desktop responsiveness. It's the one problem that gives new Linux users that feel of "slowness".

Yep, Windows takes for god damn ever to fully load up, but once it is loaded the responsiveness of the interface is snappy in general. Gnome isn't, though, and takes some time to first load, but that is primarily due to everything not being pre-loaded like in Windows. Even the main Gnome app menu is "just another panel app" so it is not completely pre-loaded, AFAIK. I think things like that are the real reasons behind thinking Linux is slow on the desktop. Don't get me wrong though, multitasking with disk I/O + something else is a horrible problem on Linux that these patches will help solve and that will be a huge help.

So glad that every now and then the real problems with Linux get some love. I'll take major under-the-hood improvements over eye candy any day, even if Linux does need both to succeed.

Next up, a single cross-distro program installer for Linux? Seriously, please? At least PackageKit is well-adopted now... Anything to help friends be less confused when trying to install Linux software from non-repo sources. "What's a static package? What's a binary? What is a tar.gz? How do I run it? What do I click on?" For @#%!% sake...

[damentz]

These patches are now part of the Zen-Kernel sources: http://git.zen-kernel.org/?p=kernel/....git;a=summary

If you do not want to use our master branch, we keep each feature available in separate branches that are based on vanilla linux.

The branch cfs-low-latency-features is available in our git repository and you may view it through gitweb here: http://git.zen-kernel.org/?p=kernel/...tency-features

[Yfrwlf]

If you do not want to use our master branch, we keep each feature available in separate branches that are based on vanilla linux.

Vanilla is a flavor in its own right. :P

[MaestroMaus]

Yep, Windows ... What do I click on?" For @#%!% sake...

Linux distro's are multiflavor things. There will always be a zillion distro's simply because "we can". You can hate it but that will only make your day worse. Better to accept it and see the positive side of it: users can have Linux the way they like it best.