Re:Where do I find more detailed changelogs?
by
worldwideweber
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There are a few changes to the emu10k1 driver that may affect you:
- Mixer improvements (should add support for treble, bass, volume, and others).
- Fixed a dead lock in emu10k1_volxxx_irqhandler.
- Small code cleanup.
-- w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Re:VM Changes
by
Ian+Schmidt
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Performance under my normal working set (KDE 2.2 w/default theme + Mozilla nightly version + the CRiSP text editor + KMail + XMMS + GAIM + several xterms, with occasional compiles and runs of very large apps like Wine and XMame) is substantially better (faster, smoother, way less swapping) on 2.4.10 vs. 2.4.9. I should note I'm running 512 MB RAM and 640 MB of swap on 2 partitions, and the system barely ever goes to swap now (with the previous VM, just starting up that environment got me into swap and it quickly maxxed out the swap from there).
So while I do appreciate Alan Cox's caution, the new VM works substantially better for me and I say "Go Andrea and Al!"
Re:Syncing with AC kernels
by
worldwideweber
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The two trees are very different in certain cases, and are likely to stay that way for a while.
The -ac tree has the following major additions:
- Uses the Riel VM (Linus uses AA)
- 32bit uid safe quota
- Ext3 file system
- PnPBIOS support
- Various PPro and Pentium workarounds
- Simple boot flag
- Faster x86 syscall path
- PPPoATM
- Elevator flow control
- DRM 4.0 and 4.1 support not just 4.1
- CMS file system
- Intermezzo file system
- isofs compression
-- w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
jmv
·
· Score: 5, Informative
These sound real good. Is there a reason that these patches are not the default behavior? Is there a downside to having a premptible kernel?
AFAIK, there are two reasons why these patches aren't in default kernel. First, I understand that decreases latency at the price of slightly decreasing throughput. The second is that though the patch is small, its effects can be complex and nobody's too sure it doesn't have any bad side effects (crash, oops,...), especially on SMP systems.
Re:VM Changes
by
TheGratefulNet
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not sure I agree it works better.
I ran all the 2.4.x's, both at home and at work. I am a software developer (not kernel, though) and so I beat on my systems pretty heavily. both systems run dualhead X and my work system additionally runs hardware (dac960) raid. cpu is a k7 tbird, in the ghz range.
anyway, 2.4.9 was ok for me. I tried 2.4.10 and both my systems (home and work) locked up within days. hard tight lockup.
I brought both back to 2.4.9, and so far, so good (less than a week running, though; it was only a week ago I went to.10 and had those problems).
I, too, worry about 3k line commits to so-called 'stable' trees to radically change an algorithm or model. can't say for sure if.10 was really a dog for me, but my systems usually run for months and months before being rebooted (usually due to my swapping of pci cards and such, necessitating a shutdown to do the board swap). so it does seem unusual for me to have a modern linux kernel freeze on _both_ of my hard-working linux boxes. hmm..
Unfortunately that picture is not at all of Andrea Archangeli, who is most definitely male. Sorry.
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
DGolden
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few changes to the emu10k1 driver that may affect you:
- Mixer improvements (should add support for treble, bass, volume, and others).
- Fixed a dead lock in emu10k1_volxxx_irqhandler.
- Small code cleanup.
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Performance under my normal working set (KDE 2.2 w/default theme + Mozilla nightly version + the CRiSP text editor + KMail + XMMS + GAIM + several xterms, with occasional compiles and runs of very large apps like Wine and XMame) is substantially better (faster, smoother, way less swapping) on 2.4.10 vs. 2.4.9. I should note I'm running 512 MB RAM and 640 MB of swap on 2 partitions, and the system barely ever goes to swap now (with the previous VM, just starting up that environment got me into swap and it quickly maxxed out the swap from there).
So while I do appreciate Alan Cox's caution, the new VM works substantially better for me and I say "Go Andrea and Al!"
The two trees are very different in certain cases, and are likely to stay that way for a while.
The -ac tree has the following major additions:
- Uses the Riel VM (Linus uses AA)
- 32bit uid safe quota
- Ext3 file system
- PnPBIOS support
- Various PPro and Pentium workarounds
- Simple boot flag
- Faster x86 syscall path
- PPPoATM
- Elevator flow control
- DRM 4.0 and 4.1 support not just 4.1
- CMS file system
- Intermezzo file system
- isofs compression
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
These sound real good. Is there a reason that these patches are not the default behavior? Is there a downside to having a premptible kernel?
...), especially on SMP systems.
AFAIK, there are two reasons why these patches aren't in default kernel. First, I understand that decreases latency at the price of slightly decreasing throughput. The second is that though the patch is small, its effects can be complex and nobody's too sure it doesn't have any bad side effects (crash, oops,
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I ran all the 2.4.x's, both at home and at work. I am a software developer (not kernel, though) and so I beat on my systems pretty heavily. both systems run dualhead X and my work system additionally runs hardware (dac960) raid. cpu is a k7 tbird, in the ghz range.
anyway, 2.4.9 was ok for me. I tried 2.4.10 and both my systems (home and work) locked up within days. hard tight lockup.
I brought both back to 2.4.9, and so far, so good (less than a week running, though; it was only a week ago I went to .10 and had those problems).
I, too, worry about 3k line commits to so-called 'stable' trees to radically change an algorithm or model. can't say for sure if .10 was really a dog for me, but my systems usually run for months and months before being rebooted (usually due to my swapping of pci cards and such, necessitating a shutdown to do the board swap). so it does seem unusual for me to have a modern linux kernel freeze on _both_ of my hard-working linux boxes. hmm..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Unfortunately that picture is not at all of Andrea Archangeli, who is most definitely male. Sorry.
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
Choice of masters is not freedom.