BFS and interest for Ubuntu Studio

[Ronan Jouchet]

Hello Ubuntu Studio developers,

A quick mail to bring your attention on recent developments on BFS, a 
CPU scheduler that could be interesting for us RT users interested in 
low latency.
Quick brief: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Fuck_Scheduler 
has nice references, there's a #LP bug, 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/424927 and Phoronix 
made some not-so-adapted benchmarks, www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14174 .

Reading Kolivas FAQ and various articles, it's clear it's still young 
and shouldn't be in the standard kernel before long (if ever). However, 
in Studio context, I have two questions:
  1. Could it be considered a viable and maintainable alternative to the 
current RT kernel which uses CFS with Molnár preempt patches? Yes, 
Kolivas describes BFS as definitely not ready for mainline, but (correct 
me if I'm wrong) from our own difficulties, it seems the current preempt 
kernel is also quite of a maintaining burden.
  2. Can we define some real test plan to accurately verify its benefits 
on a typical JACK realtime audio stack? I'd be happy to help on this but 
I'm not even sure it's a good idea, or how to properly bench.

Thank you,

-- 
Ronan  -  www.flyingmolehill.com