Submission + - Intel Chief Evangelist comments on Linux scheduler
!wintel writes: "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a
recent interview on Devx.com he stated:
"If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads. Why? Because an effective parallel program is going to assume, in general, that all threads are either running or stopped. It is messy to write a parallel program when the OS may be scheduling and unscheduling individual threads which are trying to cooperate. [...]
There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the "running of applications" interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go). I'd like to have more global tools to specify and adjust policies (8-core machinerun "only Outlook" here, run applications on these 4 cores, OS only here, explorer here, etc.)""