Wine(server) priority inversion on CK kernel mailing list

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

I'm following CK kernel development, and the mailing list had the following
posting:

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Message: 19
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 23:16:14 +1100
From: Con Kolivas <kernel at kolivas.org>
Subject: Re: [ck] wine is bloody slow with 2.6.10-ck2
To: Michal ?erav?k <michalz at olomouc.com>
Cc: CK Kernel <ck at vds.kolivas.org>
Message-ID: <41DE7D8E.8090102 at kolivas.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2"

Michal ?erav?k wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been running photoshop under wine
> with 2.6.8.1-ck9 and 2.6.9 and it was good.
> Is there any workaround for 2.6.10-ckx and wine
> to get normal speed?
> It's the same with prelink and without.

Nice your wineserver +19. If that's not enough, just run wine at +19.
Wineserver gets into a silly priority inversion scenario with the main
wine threads.

Cheers,
Con
----------

Note that Con indicated several times that Wine is a very "special" piece
of software, it has wildly differing gaming behaviour (threading behaviour)
than native Linux games.

For those of you who don't know what priority inversion is (I'll try to
explain it, but I'm sure my explanation sucks ;):
one (high priority) thread is waiting on a lock, and in order to keep
this high priority, another thread owning that lock gets more CPU to
get that lock released. Problem is that that thread should have a
lower priority, but since the high priority thread always has to wait on
the lock, the low priority thread effectively has a much higher priority.

These could just be the usual known slow wineserver communication effects
at work here, but I wanted to make sure you know about these issues on the
CK list.

Andreas Mohr