BFS is the Brain frack Scheduler. It was designed to be forward looking only,
make the most of lower spec machines, and not scale to massive hardware. ie
it is a desktop orientated scheduler, with extremely low latencies for
excellent interactivity by design rather than "calculated", with rigid
fairness, nice priority distribution and extreme scalability within normal
load levels.
Extreme scalability within normal load levels? Isn't that a contradiction?
For years we've been doing our workloads on linux to have more work than we
had CPUs because we thought that the "jobservers" were limited in their
ability to utilise the CPUs effectively (so we did make -j6 or more on a
quad core machine for example). This scheduler proves that the jobservers
weren't at fault at all, because make -j4 on a quad core machine with BFS
is faster than *any* choice of job numbers on CFS. See reverse scalability
graph courtesy of Serge Belyshev showing various job numbers on a kernel build
on a quad core machine. The problem has always been that the mainline
scheduler can't keep the CPUs busy enough; ie it doesn't make the most of
your hardware in the most common situations on a desktop! Note that the
reverse scalability graph is old; the scalability has improved since then.
Why "Brain frack"?
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/bfs-faq.txt
