Kernel scheduling algorithm and X.Org performance

[Alan Coopersmith]

Dmitry Shatrov wrote:
> I would like to talk about X-based desktop responsiveness and how close
> it turns out to be related to the kernel's process scheduling algorithm.

Sun did some work on this years ago, and ended up giving the X server the
ability to boost the kernel scheduling priority of the window manager and
the process with focus.

The research that went into this was presented at the 1993 Usenix - the paper
is available at:
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/cinci93/full_papers/evans.txt

I've been promising for a while to make the source available for X.Org and
finally got it up today at  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2192 .

This is simply a dump of the code currently in Solaris, and not something ready
to go into Xorg - before that happens, it would be useful to figure out if this
is helpful on other platforms/modern hardware, and if so, how should we make the
code more portable/generic (as noted in the bugzilla comments).

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering