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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..."
I'm very grateful that this guy took the time out of his busy schedule to quantify what every Linux user has suspected for a long time - CPU performance degradation during heavy IO. I have always felt that Linus put too much emphasis on pure CPU-bound tasks and that's why he resisted raising HZ above the ridicously low value of 100 for so long - to the detriment of desktop applications. Hopefully this a start of a trend to create a more universal general purpose kernel for interactive desktops, web servers and number crunchers.
As a Linux newbie I don't really understand what that comment means.
Is it that some versions of the Kernel are better or worse than others (e.g 2.5.2 is better than 2.5.3)?
Or does it mean that some distros of Linux (even with the same kernel version) are better or worse than others depending on how the kernel was patched, built and configured by the supplier?
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
Yeah right, Linus calls for testing. Within a few days I downloaded linux-2.5.40 and began running with it on our embedded system. I found 3 show stoppers. I emailed the kernel mailing list. I offered to help if someone wanted me to try stuff. I included enough detail then was ready to answer questions if someone asked for something I had left out.
The result?
No response whatsoever. I guess they don't want to hear that there are actually bugs in their shiny new kernel.
Aside from that after tweaking I got it to work, and it did outperform 2.4.18 in everything we cared about. Specifically the IDE system, it appeared much more efficient at scattered disk reads by multiple threads.
The question is, why bother? I have yet to see a compelling need to switch to 2.5/6. Hell, without improved USB and journalling filesystems, what was the point in 2.4? I read the kt digest, but I'm really not seeing any new wonderful things. Perhaps there are others in a similar situation?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Except if you have a flaky VIA/Athlon combo. IT doesn't like anything much more advanced than 2.4.6.