[mythtv] Testers wanted for tuner affinity scheduling changes

[David Engel]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 10:25:32PM +0000, Git Repo Owner wrote:
> The branch, devel/scheduler has been created on the
> mythtv repository by gitolite user gigem.
>         at  c25ce976be95ad6de14aa80995bc1c02ae8051d2 (commit)
> 
> - Log -----------------------------------------------------------------
> commit c25ce976be95ad6de14aa80995bc1c02ae8051d2
> Author:    David Engel <dengel at mythtv.org> at Mon, 6 Oct 2014 16:23:33 -0500
> Committer: David Engel <dengel at mythtv.org> at Mon, 6 Oct 2014 16:23:33 -0500
> URL:       http://code.mythtv.org/cgit/mythtv/commit/?id=c25ce976be95ad6de14aa80995bc1c02ae8051d2
> 
> Change the scheduler to partly use best-fit based on tuner affinity.
> If one or more programs on a multiplex or chanid are scheduled to
> record on a virtual tuner, the scheduler now tries to schedule other,
> overlapping programs on the same multiplex or chanid on related
> virtual tuners.  In the past, the scheduler always used the first
> available tuner even if doing so caused it to paint itself into a
> corner.  The intent of this change is to make better use of virtual
> tuners by grouping compatible recordings together when possible.
> 
> The scheduler currently does this best-fit scheduling in two places.
> In the first pass, it checks all showings of the program at the given
> time.  Later showing of the program are not considered at this time.
> In the retry passes when trying to move already scheduled programs,
> all showings of a program, even later ones, are checked.
> 
> Note that this change also makes subtle changes in the order programs
> are tried and retried.  In the first pass, programs in the same
> priority/subpriority (aks recpriority2) sublevel are scheduled.  In
> the first retry pass, programs in the same priority/subpriority
> sublevel are scheduled by moving other programs as long as their
> priority is not lowered.  In the second retyr pass, Programs in the
> same priority level are scheduled by moveing other programs even if
> their priorities get lowered.  The intent of this change is to try a
> little harder to schedule the highest priority for a given program.
> Previously, the scheduler was a little too quick to fall back to lower
> priority showings.
> 
> Note that there are more changes that will be considered in the
> future, possibly even adding more levels of retries.  Those won't be
> started, though, until after some infrastructure changes are made and
> those are expected to take a while.

I'm looking for testers of this change before pushing it to master.
Ideal candidates should have multiple multirec capable tuners with
each having multiple virtual tuners.  You do not have to run this
version in production.  At this point I just want to see debug output
from running in test mode.

If you want to help out, checkout the devel/scheduler branch from git
and build it normally.  Then run the following command with both this
test version and your production backend and send me the output.

mythbackend -v schedule --loglevel --testsched

I also have a version of this change as a patch to 0.27-fixes if
anyone is interested in helping, but isn't running master yet.
Contact me and I'll send you the patch.

David
-- 
David Engel
david at istwok.net