Ensuring That 2.6 Will Perform Better Than 2.4

Jeremy Andrews writes "Con Kolivas, a practicing doctor in Australia, has written a benchmarking tool called ConTest which has proven to be tremendously useful to kernel developers, having been designed to compare the performance of different versions of the Linux kernel. In this interview on KernelTrap he explains the project, noting that "a good 2.5 kernel (and that's not all of them) feels faster than 2.4 in most ways and this bodes well for 2.6." Also discussed is his high performance -ck patchsets, adding performance to the 2.4 stable kernel with the O(1) scheduler, kernel preemption, low latency, compressed caching and more..."

Comments

Re:Beta testing 2.5!

[dpilot]

It hasn't been that long that the IDE subsystem has been sufficiently stable for wider testing on commonplace hardware.

But according to the list, IDE is better now, and the 2.5 kernel is ready for wider testing.

Which brings up the key question... What are the other system requirements for running the 2.5 kernel? Back in the days of transition out of 2.2, there was a fairly decent list: this compiler, that modtools, etc. I know the new native Posix threads will require glibc 2.3, but is that merged, and what other requirements are there?

A brief kernel 2.5 HowTo by someone in the know would be welcome, about now. It would help others of us begin testing.

Re:compressed caching......

[Anonymous Coward]

Also affected,
SMP, less page faults, synchronisation requires less synchronisation etc....

GPU's and peripheral devices, the obvious bus speed and latency, as well as performance gains that GPU's can get using RLE.

Networking, never ever design a protocol that sends large amounts of uncompressed data.

Types of RLE can also increase performance in binary tree searches, e.g. in database indices, or filing systems.

Do they include use of compression in design pattern and refactoring books?

general purpose kernel

[oliverthered]

Why have a GP kernel, Linux comes in source code form, you should be able to have a taylored kernel give the best performance for you uses.

You could even stat the kernel and do a rebuild with what the stats say is best for you usage pattern.

Re:general purpose kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

The average Windows user (or even Linux user) does not know how to do the things you mentioned.
Ideally the kernel would be self-tuning based on usage patterns rather than statically built for one specific pattern.

Re:Beta testing 2.5!

[Blkdeath]

I'm planning to start testing 2.5 once it's in feature freeze.

Since it would be infinitely more helpful to test features as they're added (ie; "Whoops! That broke it!") - why do you plan to wait? The 'stable' kernels are the ones in feature freeze, and 2.2 and 2.4 are being tested more than amply already. Why not throw caution to the wind and give 'er a go?

Re:Beta testing 2.5!

[MikeBabcock]

Because you're helping the developers. You want to help the people who gave you your free OS kernel, right? Well, they would really appreciate it if you would download the latest 2.5, compile it, boot it, and send them bug reports. They may ask you a bunch of questions or give you some patches to try. You may have time to do those things, and help out the rest of the community in the meantime.

If you end up staying on 2.4.x for most of your work (as you should) for the forseable future, that's great, but at least you'll have helped the effort.