Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 11th Aug 2007 20:46 UTC, submitted by anonymous
KernelTrap offers an informative look back in time at the November 1991 release of the 0.10 Linux kernel, continuing their historical series of articles about the early beginnings of Linux. Quite entertaining is a quote from Linus Torvalds talking about when he accidentally deleted the Minix partition that he was developing Linux from, causing him to make Linux usable for more than just reading and posting to newsgroups. The article also discusses the creation of the linux-activists mailing list, offering browsable archives of that first Linux discussion forum, full of interesting gems. And finally it describes the first Linux distribution, MCC Interim, which was created and used by the University of Manchester to teach C programming and UNIX.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
This is a pretty good algorithm, all things considered. Remember, Linux won't support SMP for another four years. Traversing the task list 2-4 times isn't great, but O(N) is perfectly acceptable for dozens of tasks. Some commercial UNIX schedulers still scale linearly.
They also still use the "C = C/2 + P" function to give sleepers a bounded priority boost over hogs. Maverick sysadmins can tune the denominator these days, but the theory is identical. Yes, the algorithm is non-deterministic fuzzy math, but it's simple and it works.