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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..."
why don't you use hparm -X?? -d1 /dev/hd?
that'll enable ata??/dma features. and everything will be much faster...
Hell, a P75 works fine as a Windows NT4 PDC for a small network and can also handle low-to-medium file serving for around 20 users at the same time.
Then there's the idea of using Linux network client stations, as in "How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts", to which this site linked more than a year ago. This system can even make use of 386s -- I've already tried it. True, performance is a bit slack, but just how much power do you really need to write documents? A network-based 386 (or one running Slack 2.x) with Abiword or maybe pico/vi/emacs (some people do actually like those) works just fine.
woof.
Really... I mean, that is the whole point to actually making an IMPROVED product, right... So it's an IMPROVEMENT over what was offered before?
I know, I know... Don't beat the messenger...
But, I swear, if a company uses that line to sell a linux distro, I'm going to beat their marketers.
Good selling point. Well, yeah, it does ok, I guess... In a few places...
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Most of us?
I'm not sure that most of us read the threads on Kernel Notes... Many, perhaps... Some, maybe...
You overestimate us, I fear.
P.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Maybe I misread the numbers, but in quite a few cases the new kernel seems to be doing much worse than the old.
I guess that is the news then: "new kernel is not actually improved, it runs slower instead"?
Your missing out:
Latency, Mosix is just too un-responsive compaired to an SMP option.
Time, The more people that buy SMP boxes the better they will get, the MHz wars and Windows killed of home SMP if Intel had invested in SMP design instead of MHz then there'd be cheeper cooler SMP machines out there.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
SMP is not overrated for CPU intensive tasks.
For example, I can do distributed compilation and get about 140% speed with 2 identical machines, but with SMP I can get more like 180%. It's cheaper to buy an SMP motherboard, 2 CPUs and some slightly more expensive RAM than a whole other machine.
Dual Athlons are great, price/performance, for compiling large C++ projects (where g++ needs lots of CPU for each file.)
Rik
Whenever I see posts that say "*BSD is better than Linux", most of the time they are referring to some userland aspect of *BSD compared to some GNU/Linux distro, and not "Linux" the kernel itself. Which isn't really fair IMHO, since most of the time it's not "Linux"'s fault for whatever is being bashed at the time.
Not exactly right. There's no question it was very much Linux's fault for having a less than totally robust virtual memory manager for a number of years. In the push to add features such as memory above 4 gigabytes, stability in corner case and swap performance kind of got left behind. This has been corrected in Linux 2.5 with the new reverse-mapped VM, which sacrifices a little raw speed in such things as process forking (look closely at the benchmarks and notice 2.5 is slightly slower in Con's "process load" benchmarks) and mallocing, in return for far better and more predictable swapping performance. Plus, the new VM provides a better base for new developments you'll see in the next series, such as active memory defragmentation. Over time, we're likely to win back the slight performance losses in (certain areas of) the 2.5 vm, and then some. In the meantime, there's no question that 2.5 is the smoothest running Linux kernel ever.
BSD continues to edge out Linux in some areas, notably NFS server performance. It used to be, BSD had a lot more advantages over Linux than it does now (the BSD developers are darn good). But in the end, Linux offers a much broader range of hardware support and has way more programmers working on it, so slowly but surely is catching up and surpassing in the few areas where BSD still has the edge. If I had to speculate about why Linux gets the massive herds of programmers, I'd say it's because of the license - many volunteer programmers prefer the GPL because of the legal guarantee that their work will remain open and not end up fading away because it had to compete against some heavily-funded proprietary product based on their own code. However, it's clear there are enough top-flight programmers to whom such considerations are unimportant to keep the BSDs not only alive, but vibrant.
See here for a look at some of the nice features BSD, and some ideas for the future. In case anybody thinks the much-talked-about rivalry between Linux and BSD is some kind of war, it isn't. BSD and Linux people often work together, there is a lot of cross-pollination, and the prevailing attitude is one of mutual respect. At the end of the day, it's worth noting that, technically speaking, the closest rival to Linux in the operating system space is another open source project.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
When it comes down to it, you only get cost-effective scalability by using distributed systems or clustering. In fact, for really large systems, it's the only possible way at all.
Three years ago you would have been right, but today the cheapest way to (nearly) double your computing power is to put in a dual processor board. I.e., the day of the home dual-processor has arrived. For example, you can now get a dual processor Athlon board for $200, and in spite of what the docs say, you can put $50 processors in it instead of the $500 big brothers AMD recommends.
It's only a matter of time before you start seeing 3D games that can take advantage of dual processor configurations. In fact, they already can in the sense that if a single-threaded game can load up one processor 100% and your box still remains entirely responsive for other applications. That is, you can play Return to Castle Wolfenstein at the same time you run a compile.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You wrote:
Open-Source, perhaps. The concept of Open-Source was devised specifically to sell Free Software to the suits. However, Linux is as much Free Software (which is about freedom, and keeping you in control of your computer) as it is about Open Source, so whether it all boils down to corporate acceptance is completely up to the community. Linus didn't write Linux to sell it to corporations, he wrote it because it was fun. I'm not saying that corporate acceptance is intrinsically a bad thing (it isn't), I'm just saying that a lot of people seem to be forgetting about the whole aspect of having fun, when faced with cold cash.
Surprise -- since Free Software is about freedom, I think it's also about freedom from corporations and the marketplace (well-knowing that even suggesting such vile satanism is sure to get me modded far into /dev/null). It's OK that they use the software our community creates -- freedom is all about not taking that right away from anyone, including them -- but we shouldn't be spending our voluntary programming time sucking up to them for money. The vision of a Linux that is completely "de-geekified" that we sometimes hear about may be attractive to suits, but it sure sounds sterile and boring to me.
Against Microsoft, I completely agree. Microsoft are bent on our destruction, so yeah, we definitely have to fight them. Against Sun, though? I'm not too keen on Sun and their proprietary software, but seriously, one of the things I liked about Linux (and the BSDs) was how it was a free community-driven effort rather than a market contender like the rest. We're not a competitor, we're an alternative. As an old Amiga nut, I was attracted to this aspect because not being a market contender means traditional market methods won't be able to bring us down. It may slow corporate acceptance, but it won't stop the kernel hackers, or the other volunteers working on projects that they work on because they're fun. I think that such a community will be far harder for Microsoft to kill than a bunch of corporate ass-kissers (not that we are corporate ass-kissers, I just think that there is an increasing tendency towards that sad fate), because they're far better at dealing with corporate opposition than community opposition. This is why Linux got them to shit their pants in the first place. Unfortunately, we can already see how all our "selling Linux to suits" efforts have gotten some suits to make the association "Linux == dotcom fad == stupid business models == cash loss".
The marketplace is, by definition, a plutocracy. Who has more power in the marketplace, you or Bill Gates? If every dollar is a vote, how can it be democratic, considering the very uneven distribution of "votes"?
.......I think I've run out of things to say about this subject too, interesting as it may be. :.)
Six sick
I wonder why Microsoft advertizes in Slashdot.
/. readers use IE, if I recall the recent topic on the subject. Given that, it's not a stretch to assume that the majority of /. readers use M$ products regularly.
Most
"The complete OS+tools should be called GNU/Linux (as RMS insists)."
Hogwash. Adding "GNU/" when communicating on the subject of Linux does absolutely nothing to improve communication. It's well known that GNU tools are used with every common distribution of Linux. Prepending additional letters and symbols to the word "linux" needlessly complicates communication. I'll consider doing it when non-GNU tools become common enough with Linux distros to cause an ambiguity.
None of these stats seem to cover simulated heavy multiuser/multithread activity. That's what's key as far as I'm concerned. One of the major flaws in Linux today is the scheduling of user processes and file I/O (not sure about networking I/O, but it seems okay from simple observation). There are still severe process/thread starvation problems in the 2.4 kernel which are supposed to have been addressed in 2.5, but I've never seen a really good, real-world performance test to prove it. Until those problems are solved, Linux won't be useful for realtime server work other than web service.
In case you're wondering, no, I'm not a troll. I've done *extensive* testing in this area. So have others, which is why they've been working hard on scheduling.