comments on late joyrides re: rt performance

[Erik Garrison]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 08:57:06PM -0700, Deepak Saxena wrote:
> On Aug 07 2008, at 21:45, victor was caught saying:
> > I will keep testing, but I expect that this will also have an impact
> > on TamTam. I wonder if more 'aggressive' RT preemption patches
> > (Ingo Molnar's ones come to mind) would be something worth
> > considering. I am not sure whether OLPC would entertain the idea,
> > but I would very much like to see the RT performance improved
> > one way or another.
> 
> I'm very open to including Ingo's -rt patches in our kernel for 
> a future release if we see that it improves overall responsiveness
> of the system.
> 

These patches are surely useful for audio work, but I wonder if they
will have a similarly positive effect on user interaction with the
system.

Could it be that the poor responsiveness we experience in Sugar has to
do with the scheduling behavior of the gtk mainloop and not the kernel?
A preemptible kernel on a machine of the XO-1's specifications should
provide plenty of UI responsiveness.

Erik