The BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) CPU scheduler patch modifies the Linux kernel's EEVDF scheduler. It detects task behavior and gives more priority to short, bursty tasks. This improves desktop smoothness, lowers latency, and keeps systems responsive during heavy background loads.
To achieve this, BORE introduces a dimension of flexibility known as "burstiness" for each individual tasks, partially departing from CFS's inherent "complete fairness" principle. Burstiness refers to the score derived from the accumulated CPU time a task consumes after explicitly relinquishing it, either by entering sleep, IO-waiting, or yielding. This score represents a broad range of temporal characteristics, spanning from nanoseconds to hundreds of seconds, varying across different tasks.
While the stock Slackware kernel hangs and drop frames when playing audio during a simple application compile task in background : In my tests this new kernel plays audio flawlessly while a big application compiling and a massive multi-thread media transcode are running in background : it's day and night !
This Zenwalk kernel is exactely the Slackware kernel module options without any change other than the BORE patch : a drop-in replacement for a true Slackware desktop oriented experience.
Try it : kernel-zenwalk-7.1.7-x86_64-260809.txz
And have fun :)
