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2.4 vs 2.6 Linux Kernel Shootout
FyRE666 writes "Infoworld are currently running an interesting comparison of the 2.4 series kernel against the new 2.6 release on Xeon, Opteron and Itanium CPUs with some surprising benchmark results for common server-related tasks. Basically the new scheduler helps the 2.6 kernel to cream the old 2.4: Samba tests showing up to 73% speed increases, MySQL showing up to 29% and Apache serving dynamic content up to 47% faster!"
tried to get this in before you posted it... but dynamic only went up 22% for apache.... static went up 47%
...a stunning 129% increase on SPEClawsuit!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But how much of an improvement does it get on older hardware and/or software packages?
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
Okay, who's been feeding 2.6 speed?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I was wondering about upgrading to 2.6 from 2.4 with XFS on my box, with the improvements to SCSI support and the CPU speed ups it sounds promising :D
Then again BSD is very nice on the same hardware. Wonder how 2.6 linux & (free)BSD compare for those tasks.
These are impressive improvements.
Its actuallly hard to believe that there is that much more improvement to be gained - it will leave the microsoft servers even further behind as I don't think that they are improving their kernel that fast.
One question:
Does this mean that we can see improvements in low end systems for desktop use, or is the benefit only for servers. Because if this helps low end machines, it extends further the number of machines that can move from (say) win 98 to a real OS, whose hardware has long been abandoned by microsoft.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
What I'd like to see is Linux that could run entirely within cache on the higher end chips. Even dated UltraSparcII chips can have up to 8M/cache. That's 64M in an 8-way box, allowing for some truly awe-inspiring performance on mathematical problems if RAM is ignored.
I haven't looked into sparc assembly enough to know if this is possible.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Slackware with Dropline, btw. I do notice that Java tends to take up 250MB of RAM every once in a while while running Firebird. I didn't have that problem with 2.x.x.
Those benchmarks are nice, but who runs kernel 2.6 on production servers that need every speed they can get? It will be a few more 2.6.x releases until I consider running one of my servers with a 2.6 kernel.
Yeah, and you also lock yourself into proprietary hardware and a cycle of costly software upgrades.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
2.6 hasn't had the long real-life test use that the 2.4 family has. However, that isn't to say that 2.6 has been ignored by the distro kings, just not their staple offering, which would need to be absolutely assured of stability and compatibility.
Example, Suse 9 came with a copy of 2.4.21-144 which it installed and then gave you the sources and information needed if you wanted to update to 2.6. So, yes, it's out there, and it's in major distros, but not having the absolute assuredness of the 2.4 line, 2.6 is left as a secondary option.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
How does 2.6 compare to Free or Open BSD & how do they compare to windows 2003 server doing the same job?
The chart on the first page says that 2.6 supports read and write for NTFS. Is this really the case? Does anyone trust NTFS writing if it's in the kernel?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's not Linux 2.6.x, it's SCO/Linux 2.6.1.
..is the parformance of the Opteron. Looks like Linux 2.6.x and Opteron are a great combo. Okay, I admit, I was a bit skeptical regarding Linux 2.6, but it seems it might actually deliver.
I'm looking forward for Solaris + Opteron servers. Should be another interesting combo, performance wise. For one, Solaris 9 has some fantastic scheduling for multiprocessor machines. Additionally, it has been implemented in 64 bit for many years.
Sigged!
Wow, you need to quit bitching. 2.6 will be in the distros 'when they're ready', do you remember all the really broken 2.4.x stuff? It was REALLY bad press for folks who COULDN'T UNMOUNT DRIVES safely.
Let the ubernerds self-build 2.6 systems for a while and work out more bugs. If you want it you can have it, but mass-distribution before we even hit 2.6.2 might be a BIG mistake.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
From the article:
For instance, a simple read of a 500MB file during a streaming write with a 1MB block size on my Xeon-based test system took 37 seconds with v2.4.23, and 3.9 seconds with v2.6.
Huh? That just can't be right, can it?
Also, a lot of us have been running with NPTL for some time now before shitcanning our Red Hat installs... I would've like to seen a comparison between 2.6 and a NPTL 2.4.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
So if I use the new and improved herbal 2.6 kernel my processing power will be UP TO 150% BIGGER and my UPTIME will be 200% LONGER!! ;-)
And it's only $699 a box!
you need to install uname version 2.6.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Linus said in an interview somewhere that he was personally working on stuff in the 2.6 kernel to make Mozilla load faster.
I can tell you, boy, was I disappointed. When I tried 2.6.0, I couldn't tell an ounce of speed difference from 2.4.x...
Has anyone seen this mystical speed increase?
Unless something is seriously misconfigured, and you run a program that does not use more than 8 megs of RAM, it WILL run entirely in cache. That is how cache works, it is (unlikely swap space) totally transparent to the software. If you want to run your software entirely in cache just get some stripped-down embedded linux that doesn't use very much memory (ie runs off of a 4m ramdisk or something) and use that. But its pointless, because anything you can run that doesn't occupy more than the cache size will run entirely in cache even on the most bloated Mandrake or SuSE installation also.
Debian/Unstable can install 2.6.0 a regular apt-get install at this very moment. Its just something like:
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.0-1-processor type
If you're running stable, you shouldn't be running a 2.6 kernel anyway.
Great, where can we get it? I tried to Google your distribution, the web site is empty...
does it seem that the opteron smokes the itanium2 and xeon? this can't bode well for intel. and it certainly doesn't help microsoft if their big partner's chip's can't hang with the competition.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I guess it's important to ask the following question: was 2.4 ever designed to run on those kinds of processors? I mean, the O(1) scheduler is a pretty cool, processor independant change; but was 2.6 designed with specific optimizations for newer processors (and newer instructions) in mind? I'd be interested to see benchmarks from old hardware -- i.e., stuff like I've got sitting around. (If only I had a bit more time. Maybe I can borrow some cycles from 2.6 Linux boxen.)
All you have to do is visit the Ninnle homepage at www.ninnle.org and you'll find all that you need.
I've personally had no trouble with 2.6 since 2.6-pre. While a sample size of 1 isn't much use, the lack of hasty releases of new 2.6 versions, and the lack of bitching about showstopper bugs in 2.6, suggests it's not in too bad shape, IMO.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
www.ninnle.org, of course. Your source for everything Ninnle!
OS X is far better than either "kernel". With OS X you get a better GUI, more apps, and an OS that is backed up by a fantastic corporation, rather than a bunch of hackers who have dubious backgrounds and sketchy credentials.
You aren't comparing like with like. I have windows, linux and OSX running on different laptops at home (ok, I have a problem with needing toys, but at least I have insight).
OSX is very nice - but you don't buy it for speed. In fact, the sort of people who buy it often gloat at how you don't need to worry about that sort of thing with a Mac. I don't doubt that for many windows users, they would be much better off with a mac, as they are pretty clueless, and Mac's are a very nice implementation of the BSD core.
However, this isn't what this post is about. It could be argued that any server that runs a GUI is wasting resources. It depends on what you are asking your server to do.
There are clear improvements in the 2.6 kernel, especially with regard to Disk access from what I can see in the article.
This is totally different to which OS provides the better GUI. In any case, OSX doesn't run on a vast amount of hardware out there, and your attitude is that all that intel stuff is only good for landfill. If you accept that there is alot of hardware out there that will NEVER run OSX, then you should also accept that for those people, its very useful to know if 2.6 is a better performer.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Tried it a week ago, and I did have to separtely download and build the module utilities.... the versions in unstable were not current enough at the time.
Perhaps that changed in the last week.
Either way it's not a big deal... people should give 2.6 a try, it's not that scary.
Is there a CVSweb site for linux kernel sources? I'd love to browse around sources without having to download a tarball using only my web browser. I know I can browse all the *BSDs that way. How 'bout Linux? Is there such a site?
These are some pretty encouraging results. The hard work put in by all the kernel developers has obviously paid off in a big way. However, after reading the article I still have a few questions about kernel 2.6 performance, namely filesystem performance. Rapid random read/write access is obviously highly critical for enterprise type applications, such as apt-get package management and package database updates. Basically with the 2.4.x series of kernels, filesystem performance using either the ext2 or ext3 schemes could drop to below 5 apt-get package installs per second, even on large SMP/RAID systems. I have been investigating the use of raw disk I/O (similar to that used for high performance table spaces in products like Oracle and DB2) to reach my target of 100 apt-get package installations per second on commodity level hardware, via custom kernel level ATA and SCSI chipset drivers. But I'd love to hear that FS speeds have been improved in the 2.6 kernel. Has anybody benchmarked this aspect of the new kernel? And if so, when could we expect to see Debian start shipping with the 2.6 kernel? I look forward to reading the community's response.
for those who dont know, you've been able to get a back port of 2.6 on woody for the last month (almost).
:)
so go get it, and tell me how it will effect my surfing, emailing, mp3ing and general userish behavour on my P2 400 128RAM...
Go on, get to it!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
Sir you are a troll!
Windows is diabolical on my hardware!
bleeding
</pedantic>
bleading would be short for BSD-leading, which has been the case for some time now.
It was REALLY bad press for folks who COULDN'T UNMOUNT DRIVES safely.
The only people who had problems with that were the ones who decided to upgrade their systems within a couple hours of the new (bad) kernel being released. Yeah, sure, it was a mistake, but not nearly as bad as people made it out to be. If you put a three-hour-old kernel on a critical machine, you're taking your chances.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
That is a pretty huge difference, could it be that he didn't have DMA off on the 2.4.23 test box while it was on for the 2.6 box? Can anybody confirm this?
that makes you anathema.
Will it speed up the load time of OpenOffice.org?
Will it speed up the startup time of KDE?
Meh.
So it's not such a big leap for real users. Mind you, still a big improvement - especially for interactive use, and also considering that there are so many patches for 2.4 that are now integrated into 2.6, lessening compatibility worries (try patching Red Hat's pre-FC1 2.4 kernel source).
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I can't wait until the year 2007 when 2.6 finally moves to Debian stable.
The site's timing out for me. Anyone have a mirror up or the text of the article?
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
on low end hardware at least. I've got an old Dell with a p200 and 64 megs of ram running Slackware 9.1. The processor could keep up but there's just not enough ram, even running a lightweight window manager like blackbox or XFCE. I'm not exactly trying to run uber-apps here (Abiword and Firebird mostly). Switching to 2.6 from 2.4 helped some, but not nearly enough. Funny thing is, I ran RH 6.2 on simularily configured I guess it bugs me because I was looking forward to showing my friends how I've got a modern desktop and applications running on an old P200. hardware. When did Linux become such a memeory hog? And to think I laughed when I saw Lindows' min sys requirements where a PIII 800.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am what most people would consider a highly trained technical professional. Unlike most people who spout off at this site, I have the certificates to prove this, and furthermore they're issued by the biggest software company in existence.
I know how to tell facts from marketing fluff. Now, here are the facts as they're found by SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES:
Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS:
They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver. For Windows, the cost was only:
Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE:
A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen:
Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:
These are hard numbers and 100% FACTS! There are several more where these came from.
Who do you think we professionals trust more?
Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwalds who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???
--
Copyright (c) 2004 Mike Bouma, MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
Actually the OS X kernel is about half as fast in lmbench (UNIX benchmark) as Linux 2.4. The OS X kernel is really antiquated. Much of it is 4.4BSD and Mach code. The GUI is modern, but the guts are ancient.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thats probably the correct ordering, even though the descriptions are inflamatory.
I haven't seen many Windows vs Linux benchmarks lately, but since they aren't streaming out of Microsoft, I have to assume that Linux must be ahead on most things.
The one questionable ordering is Windows vs FreeBSD.
Maybe one of them, maybe both...
1) The new kernel is really very good.
2) The old kernel is really very bad.
Really, if such huge increase was possible, there must have been a lot of room for it. If you face a really well written program, you have a hard time to speed it up by 5%. If you can speed it up by 50% without loss in other domains, it must have been seriously flawed.
Yeah, mod me flamebait. But first think if I'm really wrong.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Linux - Fastest
Windows - Decently fast, but bloated
FreeBSD - Slow
OpenBSD - Glacially Slow
Who would have guessed that Linux is the fastest to hack into, indeed, even faster than Windows?
Yesterday I started a new Gentoo install with the 2.6.1 kernel. I used GCC 3.3.2 and glibc 2.3.2 with NPTL support. I have to admit, the naked eye can see a major diferance with the new kernel. With my XP computer and the new gentoo install (exact same computers .. P4 512MB) I ran a simple boot up and lanch a web browser test. And supprise supprise, Gnome is screamming fast. I had already booted and opened up mozilla 1.6 befor xp was even done booting! Also, simple stuff like opening up email, browsing, etc. is all noticable faster than XP. Soo... before I get slammed by the XP folks.. my XP box was also a clean install. (yes, I have no life!) I am happy to say I am one step closer to completely weening myself off of windows XP.
"If you're running stable, you shouldn't be running a 2.6 kernel anyway"
:-P
If you're running (debian) stable, you shouldn't be running anything thats not like 100 years old *anyway*
(I keep getting caught out by debian stable packages that are *way* out of date -- should be called 'debian *conservative*').
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Raw c&p, please forgive random spam.
/dev/sda3 has a major number of 8, since it's a SCSI device, and a minor number of 3.) On servers with a large number of real or virtual devices, device allocation can become problematic. The v2.6 kernel addresses these issues in a big way, moving to 4,096 major devices with more than one million subdevices per
Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise
Bigger, stronger kernel sizzles in our performance tests
By Paul Venezia January 30, 2004
If commercial Unix vendors weren't already worried about Linux, they should be now. Linux has seen wide deployment in datacenters, generally as a Web server or a file server, or to handle network tasks such as DNS and DHCP, but not as a platform for running mission-critical enterprise applications. Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX typically get the nod when an application demands the highest levels of performance and scalability. The recent release of a new Linux kernel, v2.6, promises to change that.
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The v2.6 kernel ushers in a new era of support for big iron with big workloads, opening the door for Linux to handle the most demanding tasks that are currently handled by Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX. The new kernel not only supports greater amounts of RAM and a higher processor count, but the core of device management has changed. Previous to this kernel there were limits within the kernel that could constrain large systems, such as a 65,536 process limit before rollover, and 256 devices per chain. The v2.6 kernel moves well beyond these limitations, and it includes support for some of the largest server architectures around.
Will the new Linux really perform in the same league as the big boys? To find out, I put the v2.6.0 kernel through several real-world performance tests, comparing its file server, database server, and Web server performance with a recent v2.4 series kernel, v2.4.23.
Linux Meets Big Iron
A primary focus of the v2.6 kernel is large server architectures. Support for up to 64GB RAM in paged mode, the ability to address file systems larger than 2TB, and support for 64 CPUs in x86-based SMP systems brings this kernel and Linux into the more rarified air of truly mission-critical systems. The included support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) systems; a next-generation SMP architecture; and PAE (Physical Address Extensions), providing support for up to 64GB of RAM on 32-bit systems, is also new.
There is much more to v2.6 than just bigger numbers in processor and RAM counts, however. This kernel breaks apart some of the artificial limitations that have been present in Linux from the beginning, such as the number of addressable devices and total available PIDs (Processor Identifiers). The v2.4 kernel supported 255 major devices with 255 minor numbers. (For example, a volume on a SCSI disk located at
Won't be a long wait; 2.6.2-rc3 is out now.
FC2 test1 should be out next week with a post-2.6.1 kernel as default. With SELinux to boot, though it's recommended to disable it at boot time for test1. Mandrake 10.0 beta1 has 2.6.1 too.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
2.4 is the old and busted
2.6 is the new hotness
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Oh yeah? Well, you're locking yourself into commodity hardware and a cycle of free software upgrades!
Hmm... that comeback doesn't seem as potent as I thought it would be. Oh, wait, I know! You're locking yourself into an eternity of vigilance.
Damn Nerds..
Worse than star trek, at least then there were women involved.
sadly, the parent is not flamebait but the truth. Matt Dillon is one of the most amazing programmers I've ever known. I was using stuff he wrote back in 1992 or so and impressed as hell with his work.
BSD has started feeding on itself as a group, and it is a sad sad thing.
1) Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
2) ????
3) Profit!
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
"The scary thing is that I can actually upgrade vitally needed parts of my system that depended upon the 2.6 kernel without having to go through the very RPM like circular dependency and blindly hunting the net, hoping that Google has what Debian does not... a list of locations with deb files to satisfy the dependencies. This is a really odd thing."
Imagine actually not having to spend hours upon hours just finding the locations of dependencies to install that XF86 driver. You might be able to get work done.
Meanwhile, the Association of Those with No Humor joined with the Organization of Low Self Esteem Hypocrites Aiming to Shoot Down Anything not 1337 in flaming anyone who diverged from the groupthink that there are alternatives and free choice is possible. Gentoo users laughed and remembered once again the ridicule they got from Debian users for daring to try something different and in their eyes better. While the Deb folks flame, the Gentoo users mind their own business and improve the distribution.
The only place I personally noticed the umount problem was with cdroms (part of the new ATA cdrom code?). I could umount any drive but cdroms, and the kernel would hang on reboot (not shutdown, weird) while trying to umount a mounted cdrom filesystem.
Otherwise everything else seemed to umount ok.
Otherwise I've been running 2.6 since -test3, and other than a few minor annoyances (framebuffer, cdrom umount, cd burner recognition) it's been fabulously stable and very fast.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The only really good distro supporting 2.6 soon is Fedora.
Slackare 9.1, f.ex, is "2.6.x ready".
Just download the source, compile and voila! No need to fiddle with the new modutils and such.
Why wait for distros to do it for you?
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
The 2.6 official was not available at the last release cycle of the major distros (For example Mandrake 9.2 includes support for a 2.6pre kernel for those who wanted to live on the edge, but defaulted to 2.4)
Mandrake 10, which is in beta phase 1 right now is 2.6, I imagine Suse will follow as well.
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO A FLAME WAR.
Does anyone have factual comparisons of a reasonably-tweaked Linux (2.6 kernel) with a reasonably-tweaked [x]BSD (whatever kernel)?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I haven't noticed *any* differences on the desktop.
Either you have a crazy uber-fast box or just adapted and got used to it too fast; personally I feel the difference quite a bit on my old K6-2 450mhz.
Maybe you should try booting into your old kernel (you did keep it for backup purposes, right?); maybe you'll notice the difference.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I wonder what the response would be if someone posted similar numbers about Microsoft's next OS. I'm sure they'd find creative ways to diminish the results.
One thing I've learned is not to take tech writers too seriously. Most of them are writers for a reason.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Parent post contains article text.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
*BSD faces a very bleak future. I've seen the same boring cut-n-paste "BSD is dying!" trolls for years now too, so don't dismiss what I have to say as another one of those. I researched many compartive points about all the various flavours of *BSD after my comptroller asked me to deploy an OpenBSD firewall.
/maybe/ by 2005 FreeBSD will be a contender in the low-end server market.
Granted 4.2BSD was a very fine OS, but that was in 1983. 4.4BSD, and its brother 4.4BSBD-Lite, were abymsmal performers at best during their heydey in 1993-4. Both Solaris and HP-UX had networking stacks that supported "long fat pipes," multicasting, and TCP header header prediction years before 4.4BSD did.
I don't know why 4.4BSD-Lite became so popular. Perhaps because it was released as OpenSource in 1994? But even then there were much better TCP/IP stacks and VM schemes in use (Solaris, AIX) so availability of source code was an insignificant win at best. All OpenSource does is allow poor quality code to be re-circulated and reused again and again in new systems, while high quality and RFC compliant code is relagated to the pay environment.
Regardless, the codebase of 4.4BSD-Lite became the stepping stone for all the *BSDs that are still around now. The main three *BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all use at least 85% of 4.4BSD-Lite's source code, with the rest being mostly new userland code, TCP/IP updates, and multiprocessor support.
The commerical offering, BSDI, is even more appaling - a source code diff shows roughly 94% code reuse. Paying for an archaic and outdated OS...that would explain why BSDI has less than 2% of the server market.
FreeBSD has very close ties with BSDI. I'm not one to preach doom by association, but I'm afraid FreeBSD has doomed itself by the move. If that isn't enough, FreeBSD's Common Criteria security certification is horrible. Even NT can do better than it!
FreeBSD has a reputation of being the "fastest" BSD on x86 hardware. Actual memory bandwidth performance is a fraction of all of Sun's offerings, and the multiprocessor support is a joke since it has a poorly implemented semaphore locking mechanism. I hear a total re-write is planned, and perhaps even a security audit too, so
NetBSD, I'm afraid, is dead before it got off the ground. The goal of running on as many platforms at once is a noble and idealistic one, but in the real world its useless. At best NetBSD is a mediocre hobbyist OS that runs on outdated computers. A match made in hell it would seem, since ancient source code has been hacked to run on ancient computer. Its ports to systems such as the Dreamcast are total folly, offering no more real world use than GUI systems on headless servers. And I think the installed user base of less than 10,000 speaks for itself.
I was hopeful OpenBSD would be better as its reputation for security is interesting. Sadly, its another strikeout. OpenBSD's filesystem is extremely slow, and hardware support is nearly nonexistant. There are also numerous political issues surrouding its development team that are eating away the last bit of hope. Perhaps the reason it is secure is because no one bothers to hack it since the "prize" is mostly worthless.
*BSD users too are dooming thier own OS. As a group, they are a very vocal and rowdy bunch. No real help is given to new users and such an elitest attitude is suicide.
I chose to not deploy an OpenBSD based upon these reasons. It is my humble opinion that either NT or Solaris be used for any significant work, and *BSDs be left to the hobbyists.
I have tried out 2.6 on Mandrake 9.2 and I must say that for desktop use I can't really tell any difference between 2.6 and the 2.4 version that Mandrake is shipping.
I don't know if Mandrake is patching the 2.4 series, but it seems pretty snappy as it is.
You gotta change that link to "Obligatory Litigious Bastards Link". Google has managed to put some sort of stop on the google bombing of SCO. And maybe even Caldera I guess.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
What are the chances of making D3 a database app? :=)
Seriously tho...has anyone tried games on 2.6.1?
The reviewer used RHEL but compiled vanilla 2.4 and 2.6 kernels for the test, not Redhat's. I certainly understand his reasons for doing so but I wish I could have seen how Redhat's custom halfbreed kernel would have performed. Has RedHat already squeezed most of 2.6's performance enhances into 2.4? I'd love to know as I run a number of RHEL boxes, maybe I'll start testing 2.6 on them to see what kind of performance differences there are.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
XFS Flies on my system, altho is is Xeons with very fast SCSI storage. The improvements over Ext3 were massive.
I know that it isn't recomended for slow older hard disks, but i can't see how it can be that bad as SGI have been usign it for years & a few years ago there really wasn't that much CPU available to whore wile using to the FS compared to what is available from even moderate hardware today.
XFS worked fine on a dual PIII 550!
yeah, I know. Debian is great and all, but long live Gentoo.
Thanks, yeah, I do. Still works with www.caldera.com, tho I doubt that that will last much longer.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
"Just download the source and compile" ...
and have fun trying to work without a console!
All the issues with the early 2.4 kernels were taken to heart and ended up spawing projects like the Linux Stability Project (http://www.osdl.org/projects/26lnxstblztn/results /).
Because of all this attention, 2.6-pre were quite a bit more stable than the 2.4-pre ever was.
-Charles Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
So, I like the idea. Thus I'm looking for an RPM for Fedora Core 1 on Athalon, and/or a Yum repository-site that I can use for same.
Any hints out there? 2.6 sounds nice, I'd like to use it...
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
...in response to your signature:
Actually, one of the original storylines for the simpsons was supposed to be about a boy who completely disrespected his father yet idolized a clown who looked exactly like his father.
I heard this in an interview on NPR with Matt Groening(sp?).
They later decided to drop that storyline, but the remnants are still there- the looks, the attitude towards krusty and homer.
If you ever get a chance, I highly suggest listening to that bit- you can probably find it on NPR's website.
(note to mods: don't bother voting this overrated or offtopic- it is what it is: informative. I didn't turn on my Karma Bonus so spend your mod points elsewhere.)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
i dont know if it's been posted already but check this. Aint no joke mister.
I'm not entirely sure that InfoWorld is generally a pro-Linux forum. If the article was written for /. (and not just posted here) then I might be inclined to agree with your skepticism.
If the numbers were regarding MS's next OS, no one would have a goddamn clue if the numbers were accurate because no one would have access to the OS or the code (except maybe the Gartner group or some other bastion of testing integrity).
These results appear to be pretty solid. If you think they aren't, you should be able to replicate the tests reasonably easily and see for yourself (the description of how he performed his testing was relatively clear). That's probably one of the coolest things about Linux and the rest of the Open Source movement. Anyone lying about it or exaggerating can be refuted pretty easily (unless you have magical asshole-SCO fairy dust in which case being refuted has no effect).
-- Once I was in therapy for anger management. Then I realized that I liked being angry.
IO-APIC doesn't work for me on 2.4 and 2.6.
We don't even have UFS2 support. I bet it's because FreeBSD doesn't enable ext2 by default in their kernel, and if it wasn't enough, with 5.2-RELEASE you have to unmount all ext2/ext3 partitions before issuing a shutdown/reboot to not get fsck running on the UFS ones when you reboot.
The only thing I did with 1.1.4 was edit a file in an NTFS partition. Guess what ? It didn't change when I rebooted.
By posting here you are one of us now. Welcome.
Therefore I assume #1 is much more likely than #2.
It would seem as though the 2.4 focussed on getting a number of feature in the kernel while the 2.6 series allowed the developers to work towards making those new feature faster. Programming a new feature from scratch while also aiming to optimize it for speed can often lead to buggy code. Optimized code is rarely as straightforward and easy to debug as a more general (but slower) algorithm. When it comes to something as important as a kernel I'd much rather have clean, clear code which can later be optimized than a confusing kludge meant to squeeze out the last little bit of processing power.
Just my humble opinion
It may be faster, it may be smoother, but I bet it still won't be able to handle the full power of the terrible hordes of slashdotters.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Does anyone know the Linux system requirements for 2.6? I.e. what gcc, libc, etc. are required to run it?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
That article makes me want to run out and get a dual Opteron system. :^)
from trying to emerge -U world on my gentoo
I'm trying out gentoo from stage1 now myself and it already includes a 2.6.1 version kernel. That among other things has me significantly impressed with gentoo.
;)
Although I'm not sure I know anyone I'd recommend it to, the wait is only bearable to me after having built lfs systems
nt.
I was just getting ready to justify the expense of upgrading my 386-SX20 to one of those new high-end 486 chips, but now I don't need to. This is great...it makes my SX almost fell like a DX!!!
(Sad thing is I have people that work for me that would be lost in that. Then again, I did just get done playing Leisure Suit Larry I - original version.)
I had a very similar Gateway 2000 system (p 200, 64 MB RAM, STB Virge/VX video... blech) and I remember installing RH7 on it, and watching the computer constantly thrash the hard disk, trying to swap pages in and out.
One simple thing fixed it: I started using IceWM. Suddenly, Linux stopped thrashing the disk. Bliss.
Lest you think I'm an IceWM fanboy, I don't run it anymore; nowadays I'm a KDE 3 guy with lots of eyecandy, on a much more powerful system.
What interests me is that both Linux and OS X are delivering serious *increases* in performance on the same hardware, most notably on older hardware. A certain other OS vendor who shall remain unnamed is not exactly known for that. If this keeps up for a few revisions of each OS, imagine what that'll do to the conventional wisdom.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Check out those Itanium scores.
Despite having huge 6MB cache, it is slower than Opteron in ANY test and loses half of the tests to P4.
Linux 2.6.0 looks pretty nice. :D
How is that informative? The kernel is Mach and modern *BSD, mostly FreeBSD from what I can tell - not ancient 4.4BSD. While in the latest benchmarks I've seen show Linux leading OS X in server benchmarks on the same hardware, the margin is smaller then the 2.4 > 2.6 margin in the above mentioned article. That is to say, OS X hardly sucks. It can easily keep pace, but not yet surpase. Maybe it never will, but to be even close with a Mach-based kernel is quite impressive. The Mac OS X kernel is called Xnu, and its a melding of of BSD and Mach - its no longer a pure micro-kernel and a lot of the weaknesses of Mach are offset by having many important bits, like TCP/IP, in kernel space rather then some floating server. I've seen those lmbench scores before, and the last ones I saw was comparing a rather old release of OS X to Linux. Try Panther, its noticably faster across the board.
You can support HT (hyperthreading) without
an HT-aware scheduler. Linux 2.4 does that.
It's easy; you just treat each HT processor
as if it were two processors instead of one.
An HT-aware scheduler running two tasks on
a 2-way SMP system with HT will generally
avoid placing both tasks on one physical CPU.
How on earth was this post redundant? I guess it's okay to have endless "I installed 2.6, and things 'seem' faster!" stories, but one guy points out a lack of speed increase for him, and suddenly there's some sort of redundancy.
Sweet! This was my one pet peeve when using Linux on a production server, such as a tape backup systems.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
Read the OpenDarwin FAQ: here.
The code is mostly 4.4BSD-Lite2. There is a good thread on OSNews about OS X that goes into comparing the source code, and it supports the idea that, while there are many changes, most parts of the BSD subsystem is still plain 4.4BSD-Lite2 code.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I may be the only one to feel this way... but haven't the completely unrelated SCO jokes gotten a little old? They are completely offtopic 99% of the time and most of them are just "Where do I send my 699 dollars".
The new panther is based on FreeBSD 5.0?
My music used to skip (2.4). My music no longer skips (2.6). Next question, please.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Beta 1 of Mandrake 10.0 gives you the choice of kernel 2.6.1 or 2.4.25pre6.
That's why you log in as >console. No Quartz is fun.
I live in a giant bucket.
I mean it has nearly 8000 different packages. Each one has to be rigously tested for stable, and is for all sakes and purposes nearly 100% bugfree. ALl relavent security fixes are backported to stable.
If you want something more current try 'testing'. Testing means that things should not break as bad as in unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed, and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them. You can track these here. (More info here).
Finally if you want even more up-to-date, try unstable. Most of the development work that is done in Debian, is uploaded to this distribution. This distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release. "sid" (codename for unstable) is subject to massive changes and in-place library updates. This can result in a very "unstable" system which contains packages that cannot be installed due to missing libraries, dependencies that cannot be fulfilled etc. Use it at your own risk
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Get with the program
we're supposed to be bashing BSD and Linux together.
My fucking God, but Slashdot is the absolute worst for never ever ever letting a joke die. How long did it take you to type that? Do you realize that you just threw that much time away? Your have wasted a small percentage of your life that you'll NEVER get back, parroting the same stupid FUCKING joke that gets repeated here MULTIPLE TIMES EVERY ARTICLE.
I wish this place had some basic personal filters to apply to message threads. I could put "beowulf", "profit", "soviet", and "overlords" in mine and eliminate shit that is by now far worse than the GNAA trolls in one fell swoop!
This is what the 2.4. kernel had to say about this:
Bang bang it shot me down
Bang bang I hit the ground
Bang bang that awful sound
Bang bang my brother shot me down
I was 2.4 and he was 2.6
We rode on horses made of sticks
He wore black and I wore white
He could always win the fight
...
Yeah, I know it's pretty crappy, but it's past my bedtime and I'm tired ^_^
My other UID is 1337
I am using a P4 hyperthread processor. Back in the 2.4.x days /proc/cpuinfo showed me two processors.
Now it shows me only one!
Where is the lost one? Linus, give it me back! Maybe this is the reason his mozilla is faster now?
Anyway, the PCs seems as fast as before, that means that the 2.6.x kernel is able to gain a 100% performance with only one processor ? :)
M.
Prelinking will probably help much more for what you mention.
Anyone here, who has already ported 2.4 modules to 2.6? I'd like to get my notebook softmodem going, and have some binary, that has to interface with the new 2.6 PCI methods. And to be honest, I'm somewhat stuck with it at the moment... :-(
In fact, some of the more server-oriented developers were so content with the stability of 2.5 early on that they started making mild pushes towards a 2.6.0 release almost a year ago.
(Any SuSE or United Linux 2.4 kernel is based on 2.4-aa.)
It's been a while since Turbolinux 10 Desktop (kernel 2.6) came out...
It's got several positive reviews (search Google..)
http://www.turbolinux.com/products/tl10d/
C ya.
If you're not seeing two logical processors in cpuinfo with 2.6, hyperthreading is not enabled for your processor. Most likely this is because you forgot to enable some kernel option, for example, you must enable ACPI device enumeration for HT to work. The kernel must also be SMP capable, even though you have an uniprocessor machine.
You sez:
"FreeBSD can do some really nifty stuff that Linux can't. Like jails."
Other than "jails", what other "nifties" FreeBSD has ?
I am really interested in knowing, so please elaborate.
Thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I upgraded to 2.6 in the hopes that it would be able to use HT better and thus improve performance.
The problem is, for MySQL applications, it still ran slower for me with HT enabled. And... "noht" option doesn't disable HT anymore.
Anyone know how to disable HT in 2.6?
TIA
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Would 2.6 result in a performance increase if you were using something like VMWare to run Linux? For example, I've found Redhat 9 to be UBER slow in VMWare, but SuSE 8 is quite fast. And Redhat 9 has certain 2.6 features backported... which is why I worry.
Belated pessimization is the leaf of no good.
I don't see any X11 libraries (or any widget libraries) in that list. Gnomevfs is just a "virtual filesystem" library, not part of their GUI code. I'm pretty surprised to see ORBit in there, but even that isn't X-specific, IIRC.
Does anyone have any idea if it's worth it to rebuild glibc with the new headers? If I do this, will I have to rebuild my toolchain? (I would guess yes since the bootstrap builds the toolchain, then glibc, then the toolchain again.) And will I have to rebuild world as well?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Everybody are talking about the increased performance in 2.6 due to the new O(1) sheduler, but what other differences are there from 2.4 which also make it faster, if any?
Not to be a troll, but I sure hope 2.6 makes X more responsive.
Whenever my compile reaches a large link point, interactive response is terrible...my mouse pointer jumps all over the place.
I know that I could improve things by tweaking the kernel and such, but this box is managed by our IT department (it is RH9) and I don't even have root.
By comparison, if I compile the same app in Windows XP, the system is smooth as butter. Nothing jumps, no MP3s skip, etc.
Right below the article is a link to a Microsoft white paper about "third party" research regarding Linux. Note that the white paper link is not put under "sponsored links". Apparently, InfoWorld has been bought by Microsoft's "Get the Facts" double-speak campaign. Also, the author of the Linux article is a "contributing editor", so he is probably outside the inner core of InfoWorld Microsoft payees, unless his article is taken as a direct attack against Microsoft's competitors, Sun and IBM ("Linux meets Big Iron").
Unbiased journalism -- oxymoron of the 21st century.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
if they added pre-emptive suport to 2.6.. then with server apps, of course 2.6 would be slower (I forget the reasoning why, someone was telling me about why that happens)
pre-emptive support benefits desktop stuff, not server.
besides, 2.6 is still a baby kernel compared to 2.4.. which has been around for a bit and has tried and true features.. the 2.6 is messing with new things..
compile both kernels to almost exactness, then do a speed test.
... Rhythmbox inexplicably stops skipping like a stone on the 2.6 kernel. Hooray! ... I think...
-Miles
Fuzzy
2.6.1 always freezes on me. Within ~10 minutest of boot. I'm not talking oops or panic. The only thing that gets a response is the reset button. Always during heavy disk access. 2.6.0-pretests did not have this problem and Win2k is rock solid and memtest shows no errors so its not hardware. Athlon 2500 nforce2 asus board.
YMMV.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
I don't think anybody who followed 2.5 development even a little bit is too surprised by this.
RedHat's ES/AS kernels include the scheduler and VM enhancments from 2.6.
Last google search I tried a few minutes back it was working with sco.com but not caldera
Doing what job? You didn't specify it.
I use both Linux and various Windows on a daily basis. I can tell then one or another is faster in different tasks. Linux can share files way faster. But J2EE runs on Windows much faster. Running multiple small tasks is better scheduled in Linux. But openning some multimedia files in players is better on Windows.
I don't work with Free or Open BSD on a daily basis. But developers who write the code of PostgreSQL told in mail-lists that their database server runs faster on FreeBSD than on Linux. Well, perhaps because they prefer to spend more time to optimize their code for BSD as they religiously against Linux.
My point is: don't try to compare oranges againsta apples unless you really specify the comparisson.
Less is more !