Friday August 03, 2007
Welcome back xterm all is forgiven Until about a year ago I had been using good old xterm, (I used it under at least olwm,olvwm,twm,tvtwm,ctwm,fvwm,CDE,GNOME). I switch to using gnome-terminal since it appeared to be good enough, it was the default under GNOME (by current desktop of choice) and it had a few features I really liked (though some I sorely missed from xterm too).
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Those I like from gnome-terminal and actively use are:
- Profiles - mainly for different coloured foreground (green,amber,white)
- "Right click ->Open Terminal" is very helpful since usually I can't see the desktop root window
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Things I don't like about gnome-terminal:
- It can be slow compared to xterm when large amounts of text need to be written. For example the output of make going by really quickly
- It seems to be very sensitive to your local cwd becoming unavailable so much that all gnome-terminal windows lock up - even those with remote logins
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Things I missed from xterm while using gnome-terminal:
- Different colour cursor (not the mouse pointer or shell prompt) from the main foreground colour
- Keyboard grab - I have this bound to the stop key on a Sun keyboard.
So why is it welcome back xterm ? Basically it is the performance. I use Sun Ray most of the time now, and Sun Ray at home over a 1Mbps ADSL line is perfectly usable providing I use xterm and not gnome-terminal.
I should also say that my xterm config isn't default and it is customised so that the Sun keyboard Copy/Paste keys work
The only think I'm really missing from gnome-terminal now I've switched back to xterm is the ability to change which profile (colour basically) a given window is in while it is running ( Aug 03 2007, 03:13:28 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [9]New Linux scheduler old Solaris one(s)
I find it interesting and slightly sad, given how low level a topic this really is, how much is being written about the new CFS scheduler being introduced into Linux. The sad part is how much flamage is flying around as a result of this from people not in the slightest bit involved in the desgin and development - this sadly is the ugly side of many open source groups.
OpenSolaris has multiple scheduling classes as well, actually Solaris had this and OpenSolaris inherited it when the source was opened up - but there is active work in this area going on, and the ability to realtively easily add more. You can also change the dispatch tables of the existing ones - even on a live running system (see dispadmin(1M) and ts_dptbl(4)
For some more info on how OpenSolaris does scheduling and how it is integrated into the rest of the resouce management system see this excellent intro to the topic by Eric Saxe.
As you hopefully see from Eric's presentation the scheduler is only a small part of the over all resource management issue and ensuring fairness. OpenSolaris builds on the scheduler by using things like processor pools. I particularly like the Fair Share Scheduler (FSS) class. The Sun Ray server that I use at work (and at home via VPN) uses FSS so that users can't dominate the server cpu resources.
I find it very cool that you can even use different scheduling classes for zones (actually you can do it per process but mixing FSS with TS/IA in a given processor pool isn't recommended). If all that wasn't cool enough all the policy for FSS (and much other projects stuff related to resource management) can be stored in LDAP so it is easy to implement a network wide policy.
( Aug 03 2007, 02:48:15 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [2]
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