New Linux 2.5 Benchmarks

Sivar writes "Andrew Morton of EXT3 fame has posted benchmarks of Linux 2.5.47 prerelease compared with the latest from the current 2.4 series. With some tasks more than tripling in performance, the future looks very promising."

Comments

Nice to see Linux "Growing Up"

[zanerock]

Nice to see Linux doing good on big machines with standard packages and such. I love linux, and it's the only thing I use at home for anything serious, but commercial software has always had the edge on *big* things (big disks, large processes, etc.). With recent advances in process management, and now this, a lot more people will be able to use Linux top to bottom.

I think one interesting thing that could come out of this is that IBM (and others) will be pushed more and more towards a pure service or application only niche. They won't always be able to say, "Sure Linux is great for the workstation, but what about your 8 TB database?" There's a ways to go, but a lot of the features are falling into place.

Having a unified OS from your palmtop to your TB file server will open up a lot of possibilities for people. My personal interest is in a next level of integration which is more natural to use and easier to develop, and we're getting close.

Re:Nice to see Linux "Growing Up"

[zanerock]

I don't disagree at all. I said that this would begin to push others more to service. With each new thing that you can get for free that works just as well as what other's charge for, you capture a little bit more of the market. This alone, and what has been developed to date, will not push IBM out, nor is everything that needs to be done for such things as you say been done. But it's a step.

I'm not talking now, nor even tomorrow, but in 5-10 years, I think we could see a very different landscape in how old school commercial software and hardware companies (or, in IBM's case, departments) work.

If you can spend $1 million on developing your whizzy new file system, or you can use something that's freely available (or spend $100,000 to tweak it), then the economics of it start to push people out of commercial development in some areas, especially around OS and OS functionality. Instead, you just consult, or deploy, or support and such.

So what does this mean for the everyday linux user

[pardasaniman]

For a guy such as myself, who does all his daily tasks on a linux box, what does this mean? Will it mean faster loading time/stability. Or will it make little difference at all?

Performance gains mostly for high-end

[Dacmot]

I'm a huge linux fan and I love to brag about how much better than Windows it is, etc. However I don't think it's right to say false truth like "linux 2.6 will be 3 times faster!!!!!" KernelTrap mentions that:

Most significant gains can be expected at the high end such as large machines, large numbers of threads, large disks, large amounts of memory etc. [...] For the uniprocessors and small servers, there will be significant gains in some corner cases. And some losses. [...] Generally, 2.6 should be "nicer to use" on the desktop. But not appreciably faster.

Some of the biggest improvements for desktop responsiveness can be found (for Kernel 2.4.x) at Con Kolivas' web site of performance linux patches.

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Re:Make it simple please

[Wavicle]

It is simple , tar -xvzf linux-{current}.tar.gz.
cd linux; make menuconfig ; make dep bzImage modules modules_install

You're joking, right? How many options in 2.5.47 must be selected in order for your run of the mill $9 generic PS/2 keyboard to work? I can't tell you how much fun it was building 2.5.47, missing one *somewhere* and suddenly I couldn't do anything because my keyboard stopped working.

The kernel only has an expert mode. It would be nice if there were a higher order config that asked you basic questions and built the things you were most likely to need, with the option of going into a more expert mode if you needed to fine tune something.

Re:Triple?

[Anonymous Coward]

What really amazes me is that _every_ major release of nVidia drivers has a huge performance gain for an already-great card. Hell, ATi can't even get their own cards to work right!

Re:This is This is the exact opposite of my findin

[puetzk]

well, this guy is apparently a troll, but just for the sake of argument... Anyone repeating his test would probably find very similar results. HZ (the constant controlling how often the scheduler runs) has been changed from 100 to 1000, improving smoothness for many things (multimedia apps espescially) at the cost of making the schduler overhead 10 times what it was before.

Luckily, it was very small before, and it's still very small. Maybe it went from taking 0.001% of your CPU power to 0.01% :-). The *only* times the scheduler was really a problem before were a) when it made bad choices and b) when there was gazillions of tasks. The rest of the time, it was totally negligible.

So, even if the scheduler did slow down by a factor of 2 as he claimed (and in fact, it would have slowed down by a factor of 10 due to the HZ changes so his claim would leave O(1) 5 times faster than the old scheduler) it really wouldn't matter to an ordinary desktop/server. The scheduler time is too small to be important on normal machines .

Disk buffers & memory subsystem updated??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big time VMware user (I use it for testing and Windows). I usually have 2 or 3 VMware machines running at any given time and I have plently of memory (usually 1GB, sometimes more). However, the disk buffer (or disk caching) of Linux sucks ass. I'm not kidding, if I have 1GB of memory, 900+ megs will be used for disk buffers and my very important interactive VMware processes will be swapped out to the slow disk swap file. Just using one of the VMware processes causes a lot of disk I/O and all that I/O gets loaded into the disk buffers in memory then when I go to use another VMware process it has to come out of swap. Linux is pretty bad about this with normal processes, but VMware exasperates the problem.

To boil it down: The disk buffering in 2.4 is way , way too aggressive and I haven't figured out a way to fix it. I need to be able to either limit the total ammount of memory the buffers will use or a better method would be to tag certain processes so that they will never be moved into swap for disk buffers (moving to swap "normally" is OK, just not for disk buffers). Or maybe just make it never swap out any process for disk buffers.

It seems Windows uses a more reasonable disk buffering technique and VMware works better there (especially when using several instances). I don't want to use Windows as my primary OS though because I like the built-in disk encryption and network security of Linux (the ip filter stuff is much better than Windows).

Anyone know if 2.5 has got any better disk buffering?

Re:Can't get a speedup of more than 10

[mdechene]

Amdahl's law is used to predict speed increases for multi-processor systems. In this case, you can see a gain of more than 10 if you have enough processors in use, and the majority of the work is in parallel.

I think it assumes the original was written with some sort of intelligence behind it. I bet I could write some really atrocious code that would be so incredibly inefficient that almost anyone else could get a huge performance gain from it.

It doesn't really assume anything. The equation pertains to gains simply by increasing the number of parallel processors, not the strength of the code.

Anyways, this is probably redundant, but the big gains from the new kernel is that the amount of parallel processes are increased and the serial processes decreased. In a single processor system, performance decreases as there is more overhead in swapping processes in and out. In multi-processor systems, the gains would be enormous.

Older boxen?

[soupforare]

I'm still milling over which kernel to use with my old 486's.
Right now, they're running 2.2.10, iirc; whatever the debian stable had on her boot disks.
I'm not going to compile any kernels until my dual ppro is fixed, because compiling a kernel on a PoS 486 portable is not fun :P

Anyone have any comments/recommendations on if/which new kernels are good to run on old shite?