Threading issues? [ck-request@vds.kolivas.org: ck Digest, Vol 3, Issue 16]

[Con Kolivas]

Michael Buesch writes:

> Quoting Andreas Mohr <andi at rhlx01.fht-esslingen.de>:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 10:07:18PM +1000, Con Kolivas wrote:
>> > Audio runs as a separate thread outside of wine potentially through who 
>> > knows how many layers as a combination of both process and kernel 
>> > context so that's already complicating the issue by having a separate 
>> > thread. X does the same again. So what the win32 game is doing under 
>> > wine when it asks for audio or graphics to be done will be handled 
>> > completely differently to windows. How blocking is done between the 
>> > graphics and audio calls, when you have a highly cpu bound task (the 
>> > game) as well is definitely complex and not just the kernel that is 
>> > responsible here. Add to that the fact that wine itself runs a few 
>> > threads and as I said before, it's a miracle it runs smoothly at all.
>> This shows that dynamic reloading of different schedulers
>> is a very useful thing: if playing some game on Wine doesn't work with the
>> currently used scheduler, you just load a specially adapted scheduler (say a
>> "Wine" scheduler for close Windows scheduling compatibility ;) in order to
>> have some great gaming session, and that's it.
>> (of course it'd be useful to have a universally usable scheduler instead,
>> but that is very difficult if not impossible to achieve)
> 
> Isn't Nick Piggin maintaining such a dynamic scheduler loader?
> I can't remember exactly, but I think he has patches for runtime switching
> between his single priority array scheduler and even staircase with
> single priority array.
> Please correct me, if I'm wrong.

Peter Williams is maintaining such a patch. He calls it hydra (many headed 
beast).

Cheers,
Con