LinuxWorld: Stronger I/O & VM Coming Soon to Linux

Mark Brunelli, News Editor writes "Tim Witham, CTO of Open Source Development Labs and a featured speaker at LinuxWorld, says the next Linux kernel will feature improved input/output and virtualization capabilities. Said Witham: 'Enabling virtualization is a big win [for Linux 2.6] as it allows IT shops to start their development cycles for a technology they will be looking at deploying within the next year or so. There has been lots of good work done with regard to system scalability, memory management, disk I/O, process and thread scalability. Also, work done for availability, like a greatly improved multi-path I/O [were victories].'"

Comments

Content-free

[interiot]

Since the linked article seems to no more information that what the summary says, here's another link that discusses virtualization+kernel a little more. It looks like it's the Xen work that's going into the kernel (the project that IBM and AMD and others have been putting money and developers into to get working).

What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway?

[bill_mcgonigle]

What's the deal with disk I/O killing the responsiveness of the system anyway? When you have to move monstrous amounts of data, a Linux system can get practically unusable, no matter which user is initiating the load.

I used to think this would go away with faster machines, or the interrupts would be freed by using SCSI HBA's, but the symptoms still persist today, even on a modern 'fast' machine.

I never experienced anything like it on, say, Sun hardware, in the pre-Linux days.

Re:What's with Linux and Disk blocking anyway?

[oliverthered]

And I've just spent the last 6 months trying to find out what's hanging on to that IRQ and blocking everything else..

DMA should stop this from happening (I wonder if it happens outside X86)

Re:Terrible title

[jd]

I believe they're referring to Xen, which can virtualize (in theory) any OS - not just Linux - and is (reputedly) considerably faster than UML.

Re:May be what the Linux community needs

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

My mistake, article was (though unclear) talking more about Virtual Machines than Virtual Memory, I guess I'm too frustrated at having the occasional kernel panic...

Re:Which next kernel?

[Lemming Mark]

Xen support won't be in 2.6.13 but could be in 2.6.14. Basically the hold up is in restructuring to fit with emerging kernel policies on x86-like architectures (i.e. fit them into the i386 directory, instead of forking a separate arch tree as x86_64 did). Once this restructuring is done, the Xen patches should get merged.

Also according to their info...

[jd]

...once CPUs are capable of supporting virtualization directly (the next generation of Intel and AMD should do this), host OS modifications will not be required.

So, whilst you are correct it cannot virtualize any OS on current processors, that is not quite the same as saying it can't virtualize any OS in the future, which is what I was referring to. Apologies on my part if I wasn't clear on that - I'm not always as clear as I could be.