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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].'"
'VM', in the context of the Linux kernel, refers to its virtual memory manager, not virtual machines. It's incredibly misleading to read about 'stronger VM' like this.
Wasn't usermode Linux integrated into the 2.6 kernel anyway? What improvements in virtualisation is TFA referring to? It seemed remarkably short on details.
Improved I/O means home networks should run closer to the capabilities of the wire, plus multimedia on the computer is less likely to stall when playing. It may also make Linux more attractive to games writers, as a lot of games these days are heavy on multimedia.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I agree it's annoying, even using a pre-emptive kernel doesn't seem to help much anymore, although I swear it used to.
Not sure if that was a real post or meant to be humor, but mucking with the VM is not the way to be more stable. There were major stability issues in the early 2.4 kernels due to the new VM that was swapped in. My company is still dealing with bugs in what can be seen as a VM issue - the 4Gb user/4Gb kernel split in RedHat advanced server, and this is in the new U5 update.
The simple answer is Linux uses write-back caching, and will let a process write data faster than it can actually be sent to the disk, thus filling up all the available memory pages and blocking other I/O.