“In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work
towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some
very significant milestones building up recently and new patches
continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience
of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal
of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting
improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not
yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past
several weeks and it is quite small — just over 200 lines of code
— but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.“The patch being talked about is designed to automatically
create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop
interactivity under system strain. Mike Galbraith wrote the patch,
which is currently in its third version in recent weeks, after
Linus Torvalds inspired this idea. In its third form (patch), this
patch only adds 224 lines of code to the kernel’s scheduler while
stripping away nine lines of code, thus only 233 lines of code are
in play.”