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.