[PATCH] sched-2.5.64-bk10-C4
This fixes a fundamental (and long-standing) bug in the sleep-average estimator which is the root cause of the "contest process_load" problems reported by Mike Galbraith and Andrew Morton, and which problem is addressed by Mike's patch. The bug is the following: the sleep_time code in activate_task() over-estimates the true sleep time by 0.5 jiffies on average (0.5 msecs on recent 2.5 kernels). Furthermore, for highly context-switch intensive and CPU-intensive workloads it means a constant 1 jiffy over-estimation. This turns the balance of giving and removing ticks and nils the effect of the CPU busy-tick, catapulting the task(s) to highly interactive status - while in reality they are constantly burning CPU time. The fix is to round down sleep_time, not to round it up. This slightly under-estimates the sleep time, but this is not a real problem, any task with a sleep time in the 1 jiffy range will see timekeeping granularity artifacts from various parts of the kernel anyway. We could use rdtsc to estimate the sleep time, but i think that's unnecessary overhead. The fixups in Mike's scheduler patch (which is in -mm8) basically work around this bug. The patch below definitely fixes the contest-load starvation bug, but it remains to be seen what other effects it has on interactivity. In any case, this bug in the estimator is real and if there's any other interactivity problem around then we need to deal with it ontop of this patch. This bug has been in the O(1) scheduler from day 1 on basically, so i'm quite hopeful that a number of interactivity complaints are fixed by this patch.
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