Klaas van Gend wrote:
On Wednesday 15 September 2010 05:38:49 jordan wrote:
Which leads me to my last example. Most people are aware that since
about 1999-2000, Linux has dominated the movie industry. Beginning
with Titanic and even today with say, Avatar.
I would be willing to bet, that all of those wonderful rendering farms
and production suites, are
in fact using rt-linux.
Please put a lot of money on that bet, because I'd like to win it :-)
Why would those rendering farms use rt-linux?
Rendering is not done in real-time - far from it actually. It can take minutes
of the entire farm to render a single frame. So rendering is nothing but CPU-
intensive (calculating how all those lightbeams are reflected by each surface)
- and everything I/O bound is about throughput: writing the rendered pixels to
disk and getting more surfaces from disk.
There are no deadlines for rendering, there are no penalties if a frame is
late by seconds - if the farm cannot complete its job overnight, they'll add
more CPU power.
While all of the above is true, I'll add that it's worth testing
RT because certain applications which have lock-step operations,
can be very negatively impacted in throughput by severe lack of
determinism. If all of a set of operations need to complete before
they can do the next set of operations, and one of the threads takes
very long, the others all idle as a result. If this happens frequently,
you're better off trying to cap max latencies.
So RT actually provides improved *throughput* as well, despite the
increased overhead.
I don't know if these rendering type applications necessarily
fall into that bucket, but I would at least take a look.
thanks,
Nivedita
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rt-users" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
