bfq & xorg 1.10.3

[paziu]

hello everybody,

it looks like BFQ topic slowed down a bit in its 'post' activity here,
in my opinion, it sucks,
an encoding in the "background" kills functionality of X, and of course KDE or whatever you run...
it feels like a winowz system,
the KDE 4.7.0 has issues with switching between the foreground and background frames ( let me not use the 'windows' word )
I am already using the most stable, and first the 'usable' so far 280.13 nvidia drivers, on 2.6.39-r3 kernel, shrinked to the kind of the minimum 2.7 MB, with all it needs to run with the "decent" performance on a 4 core intel system. and it behaves as a windoze box....

after running the system for more than 4 weeks I came to theese conclusions: ( I got 17 different kernels incl. gentoo stocks, 3 rootfs's and a number of nvidia drivers.... )

1> BFQ sucks
2> KDE 4.7.0 sucks
3> I doubt that 1.10.3 xorg-server sucks

I just do not understand peepl who are saying here, this BFQ scheduler is great, plus, they are even suggesting, and considering to put this junk to the mainstream.... WTF?

This scheduler is not even good for a workstation, maybe good for a ms-dos style batch processing, stand-alone box.... msybe.. not multitasking and responsiveness....

Some of you, gurus, are suggesting to BOOST the system with certain kernel patches, certain configs... great, but BFQ - that blond girl suggests to run j40 on a quad cpu.. and provides times that really do not have anything to do with system "usability", compile times that are 1/1000s better? - I overclock my box by 1 MHz and BFQ is not worth a dime....(???) blond[?]

what's your opinion?

paz

[Odysseus]

I know it's been awhile since you posted this, but since it's remained unanswered, I thought I'd give it a shot.

paziu, after reading your post I think you are confused a bit about things which may be leading to the disappointing results you are experiencing.

The buzz around this and other forums has been about the Con Kolivas BFS (Brain Fuck Scheduler) patch set not the BFQ IO scheduler patch which is completely different.

The BFS patch replaces the default CFS (completely fair scheduler) and is designed for real-time desktop / laptop use on systems with limited number of CPUs. The default CFS scheduler is designed to scale up to hundreds of CPUs and is more complicated than the BFS. Both owe a large measure of their designs to Kolivas who did much of the work on the CFS scheduler before falling out with Linus and leaving the kernel group, but that is where the similarities end. I have found the BFS patches produce a much more responsive kernel and have been using kernel sources with this patch included for well over 2 years now.

The BFQ patch is something altogether different. It's intended to govern IO usage to block devices like hard drives, which is why you'll find it located in a different section of kernel config. I've found this patch does little if anything for me and have had much better results with the default CFQ IO scheduler on my conventional hard drive. Many around the net are posting that with SSD drives the noop IO scheduler works best and gives dramatically improved IO over either of these other IO schedulers, but since I don't have this type of drive I can't confirm these results. So for your purposes the CFQ IO scheduler is probably what you want to use.

I've been a KDE user for well over 15 years. I don't find it sucks at all. I liked KDE-3.x quite a bit more when 4.x first came out. Now that I've learned it, I love it. With it properly configured it works well, but like all desktop environments this is a matter of personal taste. So your negative opinion, is just that an opinion.

I hope this helps,

Ciao,
Odysseus

[albright]

FWIW, it appears to me that the BFQ has an advantage in
one situation which I run into once an hour. I have an
rsync based backup system (snapback) and with CFQ there
are noticeable lags/delays when the hourly rsync jobs start.
They seem to be less noticeable with BFQ.

Of course, there are many variables involved, but this is
what it "feels" like after much use of both ...
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[dE_logics]

I don't have problem with any KDE version nor Xserver, but with BFQ, removing which solved all problems.

So I run stock kernel now.
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