Linux Kernel Performance How Will 2.6 Measure Up?

An anonymous reader writes "This story offers some interesting performance comparisons between the latest stable Linux kernels (2.4.x) and the latest development Linux kernels (2.5.x), comparing performance on both a single processor and dual processors. These numbers help validate that the upcoming 2.6 kernel will outperform the current 2.4 kernel, at least in some instances..."

Comments

Re:Compile time speedups

[IamTheRealMike]

One problem I ran into was what libraries you could expect to be installed on any given platform. Sure, there's the LSB, but does the LSB specify a base set of packages that make up a desktop or a server?

Nope, you're right, but autopackage can figure out what libraries are present and retrieve (assuming they've been packaged) the libraries from a DNS style distributed network, apt style.

My aim was a little different from yours though. I was going for complete binary packaging from beginning to end. No source building, as automated ./configure; make; make install;s tend to make distro specific code.

Hmmm, how did you get the impression that autopackage is source based? A .package is a binary package from end to end, the user doesn't need to compile anything.

All I provided was an archive format and a self extracting gui or command line installer that totaled under 50k of overhead

We're using a similar idea except the scripting language and front end code is external and installed-on-demand when you run a .package file if it's not already present to minimize package file bloat.

Maybe I should start it back up. It's not like I have much else going on lately. hmm...

If you're interested in the problem, please take a close look at autopackage first, feel free to hop onto IRC (freenode#autopackage) and talk to us first. We're normally around in the evenings GMT (both the core developers are in europe). It'd be a shame to duplicate effort when our projects sound so similar.

Re:Compile time speedups

[Bios_Hakr]

I know Mandrake has done this for a while. I think RedHat does the same. I can't remember with Gentoo, but I did try some hdparm flags and didn't notice any real change.

Basicly, do 'hdparm /dev/hd[x]' and look at the output. It will tell you which modes are in use for the current drive. Then do 'hdparm /dev/hd[x] -t' and see how fast your drive is running. Look at different optimize flags and test after each to find the best settings.

You can even use it to test cdroms and RAID arrays. Just remember that when you optimize an array, you want to optimize each disk (/dev/hd[x], not /dev/md[x]) seperately, but test the array as a whole.

One other note, the '-t' flag, like most synthetic tests, may not show the best settings for the drive. A lot of times a timed kernel compile (or my new fav test, a mozilla 1.0 compile) will reveal benifits, or detraction, not shown in a synthetic benchmark.