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Andrew Morton And The Low-Latency Kernel Patch

Posted by timothy on from the stealing-time-and-returning-it-like-new dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "KernelTrap has interviewed Linux kernel hacker Andrew Morton, author of the low-latency patch. Though his patch has received less attention than Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch (recently merged into the 2.5 kernel), it results in quite significantly lower latencies. The interview is quite interesting, delving into the low-latency patch, explaining how it works and the differences between it and the preempt patch. He also talks about his ext3 work, porting that journaling filesystem from the older stable 2.2 kernel to the current stable 2.4 kernel."

2 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Process scheduling by lupetto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been waiting for years for Linux to have finer control of process scheduling.

    I hope someday that Linux will use a method similar to Irix, where you can specify a priority from 0 to 255, modify it's timeslice, and make it realtime or timeshared. This was one of the best things about Irix, and something I could really use for Linux.

  2. Why not SoftUpdates for Linux iso Journalling? by redelm · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've used Kirk McKusick's SoftUpdates for *BSD and been very impressed. Pulled the plug on four kernel compiles near the end. In three of the four cases, `make` just picked up the compile losing ~45 seconds. In the fourth, a `make clean` was necessary. In _all_ cases the fsck on reboot was minor. I've only lost power once in Linux during a kernel compile. I had to reinstall. It was too far gone for e2fsck.


    IMHO, SoftUpdates are better than Journalled File Systems. There's no journal file to maintain, just careful ordering of the writes. Why no discussion of it for Linux?