Re: making something happen in real time

It's obviously crazy to have xscreensaver walking on any unattended processes. Not a kluge (it's what nice is for), modify the xscreensaver startup command to run niced +19.

A few years ago there was a lot of work on improving linux scheduling for real-time applications (google real time linux), but I don't know the state of those projects these days. They were also motivated by music and video applications for the most part.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Comment on Re: making something happen in real time

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: making something happen in real time by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Nov 06, 2005 at 19:11 UTC
Hmm, good point, but xscreensaver runs at nice +10 by default. I think it's more of a problem with latency. My script spends 99% of its time asleep, so while it's sleeping the scheduler says, "OK, nobody's using any cpu. Even though xscreensaver is running at nice +10, we'll give it a chunk of cpu, because nobody else wants any." Then when my higher-priority process pops back up and demands some cpu time, there's a few hundred milliseconds of latency before its request is granted.	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^2: making something happen in real time
by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Nov 06, 2005 at 19:11 UTC

Hmm, good point, but xscreensaver runs at nice +10 by default. I think it's more of a problem with latency. My script spends 99% of its time asleep, so while it's sleeping the scheduler says, "OK, nobody's using any cpu. Even though xscreensaver is running at nice +10, we'll give it a chunk of cpu, because nobody else wants any." Then when my higher-priority process pops back up and demands some cpu time, there's a few hundred milliseconds of latency before its request is granted.

[reply]