Karol Krizka wrote:
read the Gentoo Kernel Guide and from it seems to me that ck-sources are the best.
I use ck-sources, but from the rc-releases (patched myself) for my desktop as I like to test things, and I use ck-sources (server) on the office terminal server.
I like ck-sources because it was the only one that supported cfq for awhile there until it made it into mainline. It was the first i386/x86_64 kernel to support IO-nice levels (a task with a nice level also has it's read IO niced).
Now, Con has been working on swap pre-fetching, which basically reads back your swap into memory, but in a state where it can be discarded freely if the machine needs it. If a swapped app is used, then it's already tagged in memory and then just gets removed from swap. This leads to a 5 fold increase in using say, Firefox once it has been swapped out.
ck-sources also implements SCHED_ISO which is basically RealTime, but with a cap on CPU usage. People like it, because it just works "out of the box". There is also SCHED_BATCH which gives longer timeslices to processes with this schedule at the cost of interactivity, as well as basically giving it a nice of +19. Very useful for compiles, things like Seti, or even emerge syncs.
Not to mention things like the hardmapped and mapped tunables in the /proc filesystem which give you more control over memory usage for your desktop system. Don't forget the compute and interactive tunables that help you control how processes get scheduled.
-- [email protected] mailing list
