Two Years With Linux BFS, The Brain Fuck Scheduler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Two Years With Linux BFS, The Brain Fuck Scheduler

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16302

[yoshi314]

this benchmarks are totally inadequate. BFS scheduler is designed to reduce LATENCY in desktop applications.

i'd check for amount of frames dropped in some FPS game or quality of video capture framerate-wise, as this is where the scheduler latency matters. but these things cannot really be measured with a benchmark ( i think ).

before CFS epsxe emulator would stall randomly for ~0.5 second now and then. on CFS i sometimes get 0.1 sec delays, which is not the case with BFS at all. that is what should be measured, not performance of webserver or how much FPS can you squeeze of a game.

Phoronix staff - please, read again this post http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/9/6/231 and think about this article again.

[dansan]

BFS is about latency, not throughput!

[curaga]

Well, don't openarena and unigine benches also list the min fps? That should be a good indicator.

[RealNC]

Kernel 3.0 is unusable for me without BFS. I mean really, a total piece of crap experience. Benchmark THAT.

[Saist]

Would someone care to explain how somebody like Con-man Kolivas who goes out of his way to burn bridges and insult players... still manages to get press releases?

Oh, and RealNC, don't make me step back in here and smack you around some more. Seriously, if all you can come up with is a one liner retort that such and such a kernel version is "insert explicative here" you haven't learned anything over the years.

[RealNC]

Would someone care to explain how somebody like Con-man Kolivas who goes out of his way to burn bridges and insult players... still manages to get press releases?

Because he wrote a scheduler that improved Desktop Linux for a lot of people. About the insults, surely, when you're treated with so much ignorance you tend to tell all the ignorants to go fuck themselves. Which is only something that raised my respect for CK and what he's doing even more. He's like the lone hacker who accomplishes tremendous tasks and throws the results at the face of the corrupt establishment. In other words, a software hero.

Oh, and RealNC, don't make me step back in here and smack you around some more.

Please do. It will be the usual offensive stuff that attacks people on a personal level with lots of bigotry in it. Seriously, go ahead.

Seriously, if all you can come up with is a one liner retort that such and such a kernel version is "insert explicative here" you haven't learned anything over the years.

What I have learned over the years is that one guy, alone, improved my Linux experience a hell of a lot while his contributions were never acknowledged properly. And also have learned that people like you will continue to spread FUD because you simply can't stand being wrong. But I've got some bad news for you: You're not the pope.

[yoshi314]

it's just too bad that BFS + systemd is still a no go :/ (no cgroup support).

[garytr24]

although in this case favorable, I think raw performance benchmarks send the wrong message. What BFS is optimizing for is user experience, UI latency, sometimes that can come at the expense at total throughput, and that's ok.

[RealNC]

Con Kolivas commented on his blog about the new Phoronix benchmarks:

http://ck-hack.blogspot.com/2011/08/...isits-bfs.html

Edit:

The graph about the 8000 processes server is surely slamming at the face of CFS. And that, ladies and gentlemen (and Michael, most importantly), is how you would benchmark a CPU scheduler. The Phoronix article misses the point almost entirely. If you can't produce appropriate benchmarks, why did you bother at all? It was an article that serves no purpose. So why did you write it then?