Posted by
michael
on from the make-kpkg-kernel_image dept.
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."
Nice to see Linux "Growing Up"
by
zanerock
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
Performance gains mostly for high-end
by
Dacmot
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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
by
Wavicle
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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.
-- Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Disk buffers & memory subsystem updated??
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
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?
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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.
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.
--
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.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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?