Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Two items to check out today: ODF-XSLT project and IBM developerWorks

First a website: I came across the ODF-XSLT project and I will say this is just the tip of the iceberg for where the world could head if documents are moved into an ODF format. Nonetheless this is very cool (I didn’t see a demo code project to download, but it looks extremely easy to setup). Anyway, check it out here.

The second is an article over at IBM’s developerWorks on “Multiprocessing with the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)”. If you have been paying attention to LKML over the last year you’ve seen plenty on this. CFS is a great new addition to the Linux kernel and Avinesh did a great job covering the new CFS features, rationale, data structures and finally how to actually use it. I also noticed a fair (pun intended) credit to Con Kolivas for being the one to prove fair scheduling could be done without wreaking havoc. Con’s frustration with getting his patches accepted has been well publicized, but it looks like his contribution will live on in the CFS code.

Some of these changes were made for these reasons:

• To enable better scheduling for servers as well as for desktops.
• To provide new features that were requested.
• To improve the heuristics. Those used in the vanilla scheduler made some attacks easy to implement. Also, if the heuristics gauged a scenario incorrectly, unwanted behaviors could result.