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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..."
Of course, the real solution would be to not need to compile software (plug plug :)
What is the weakest specced machine that anyone here is getting productive/useful work with Linux done on? Do people use Linux on 468s at 12mhz? P75s? Just curious.
but will it corrupt my filesystem?
Performance is important, certainly, but I think some people (*cough* overclockers *cough*) assign it a bit too much importance.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It looks like the new kernel better utilizes multiple CPUs. This is a great thing. Linux needs better support for SMP systems if it is going to play with the big kids in the high-end server market. (I know, Linux is partially there).
more resistant to the /. effect?
I wonder how well it compares to the BSD kernels, in both performance and stability?
Linux marketing through Slashdot? Hehehe... next we'll have microsoft and intel buying banner space... Oh...
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
The whole point of Linux development is to , explore strange new algorithms, seek out new drivers and new filesytems, to boldly code where on one has coded before :)
As with all experimental endeavours, you do sometimes get better results, sometimes worse, but from those mistakes lessons are learned and better methods are devised.
It's not about "marketing". It never was.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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.
Something like OpenMosix should really be a standard part of the Linux kernel already, as should other support for simplifying clustering, distributed computing, communications, and distributed shared memory. Distributed systems and clustering is the future, not SMP.
Amazing, I've been running FreeBSD since 2.8 and I've never had an unresponsive system even while doing a build world; I guess the 2.4 kernel is alot worse than imagined.
This is, by and large, the fault of the scheduler, largely unchanged in 10 years and described by Linus, even whilst he wrote it, as a 'hack'. However, it worked, and Linus, being the extremely sensible and conservative maintainer that he is, kept it until recently - process schedulers are difficult things to get right, and their performance is crucial to the performance of the kernel as a whole. Not to mention that for the tasks that Linux has been used for historically, primarily low-volume server tasks on low-end hardware, it isn't really a bottleneck.
Still, the scheduler has been gutted and rewritten for 2.6 by Ingo Molnar - the now somewhat-famous O(1) scheduler, which performs much more fairly under load, and dispenses with almost all of the strange pauses and scheduling glitches under load. Current vendor kernels based on 2.4 (Red Hat's and SuSE's at least, I think) have had the O(1) scheduler backported to them as well. In fact, if you're running near enough any current 2.4 kernel other than mainline, you get the O(1) scheduler and your share of scheduling fairness.
The new scheduler is also a fundamental basis for Linux 2.6's new NPTL 1:1 threading, which has so far proved spectacularly (record-breakingly?) fast. Hmm, on second thoughts, perhaps I probably shouldn't mention threads and FreeBSD in the same post. I mean, isn't this the same FreeBSD that's still waiting for a single half-decent pthread implementation? Oh well, better hope 5.0 is out soon...
cheer!
Why does it seem that so many people in the current Linux community *think* that it's about marketing and money, though? *sigh*
Six sick
people in the current Linux community *think* that it's about marketing
Because a lot of the new-comers have been beat-up with Billy G's ugly-stick for so many years. That's all they know. Marketing ploys and false hype.
monkeyboy anyone?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I'm afraid part of it might be because of the Linux community itself, though.
After RedHat and VA made it big, way back when, a certain amount of "make money fast!" thinking crept into the Linux community. It started seeping into our news and other "internal" communications too (I mean /., Newsforge, Linux e-zines and that sort of stuff, not the lkml) -- people started focusing more on how one could use Linux and open-source to make profit rather on technological issues. The line between hacker and marketer seemed to be breaking down. A O(1) scheduler is all fine and dandy, but how can my favourite business use it to make more money?
Perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there -- I hope I am -- but seriously folks, am I the only one who have noticed such a switch of focus? I read the articles at NewsForge about the last LinuxWorld Expo, Roblimo seemed to agree that the old bunch of long-haired hackers in sandals had largely been replaced with business reps -- and to add insult to injury, Microsoft was present.
My fear is that Linux will end up becoming as sterile and dead as other "rebellious" technological (or otherwise) ventures tend to become when they're subjected to corporate clutches. Greed kills.
Six sick
OK, I have had it up to here with all this FreeBSD worship. After putting up with this for a long time from one of my good friends who happens to be a BSD bigot, I made the mistake of wiping out my Mandrake 8.2 and installing freeBSD on my box.
After a few months of that, I am back back in Mandrake 9.0 with relief and no regrets. Why?
1) I found that, for the things that I do, FreeBSD offered no advantages at all. Performance and stability was no better than Mandrake 8.2. In fact, under heavy loads, my experience is that Linux 2.4.x is much better. (I run lots of octave math simulations and lots of fortran number crunching programs, often several at a time. )
2) For people used to working with linux, there are lots of annoyances to working with FreeBSD. I missed the convenience of RPMS. Many of my favorite programs did not compile properly.
3) When pitch came to shove, my friend had no suggestions as to why the FreeBSD install did not perform as well as linux, except to tell me that I must be mistaken in how well the linux install performed! Duh!
Now, maybe under some circumstances, it is probably true that FreeBSD does outperform linux. But I could not care less. For the work I do (mostly on the desktop, running simulations, running mozilla and xine), linux is demonstrably a better system than FreeBSD.
Magnus.
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