Slashdot Mirror
Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance
Michael writes "The Linux 2.6.20 kernel will feature KVM support, Playstation 3 support, and a variety of other improvements. With the Linux 2.6.20-rc6 kernel out the door, Phoronix has written a performance comparison of the Linux 2.6.20-rc6 kernel against the 2.6.19 and 2.6.19.2 kernels in a variety of benchmarks."
Why is playstation support being included in the kernel? Is that really necessary?
Furthermore, the article didn't exactly make it clear what the support is. Can anyone clarify?
All it takes to get a /. front page link to my ad-word laden website is to create a few bar graphs showing that nothing has changed in the last few kernel revisions and add 2 paragraphs of filler text?
So the bottom line here is that they're almost exactly the same?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Is this a joke?
He's running kernel benchmarks on a laptop?
Looks like half the things he was measuring were I/O bound? On a laptop?
Phoronix.... more like Moronix.
I tried to read the article, but someone has vandalized it with double underlined words all over the place and annoying popups when your mouse slides over them. I closed the window.
Since the article doesn't have any content, I assume this was a badly disguised slashvertisement? None of those are even kernel benchmarks.
/. down already. You're not even trying to compete with sites like Digg are you.
Stop the bullshit ads or just shut
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Yeah, that was a totally worthwhile read, no?
Let me give everyone else the bottom line, and save you two or three minutes of your life, that you'll otherwise never get back: Now, back to our regularly scheduled Slashvertising....
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With the Linux 2.6.19 kernel coming out last November and only two additional releases in the 2.6.19 branch, the Linux 2.6.20 kernel is certainly coming quickly. Linus Torvalds had mentioned in the 2.6.20-rc6 release announcement that this is likely the last release candidate. However, even with this quick kernel release coming the features are definitively impressive. Sony Playstation 3 support and Kernel-based Virtual Machine support are among the exciting features in this release. From today's testing in our environment used and set of benchmarks, there were no definitive performance gains or losses seen throughout the set of tests.
It's nice to get features without sacrificing performance. The added PS3 support would nab those ubuntu people to put it on PS3. Not only that, but yellow dog might get some competition if some peoepl decide to make their own PS3-based distro with all kinds of extras.
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
It's support for the cell, and some PS3 hardware.
Why would it not be included? If the kernel is still shipping support for 15 year old legacy ISA hardware (yes it is) and Cyrix X86 optimization s(yes it is), it can include support for the PS3, which is likely more in use than either of the above.
There is support for hardware in the kernel that is so obscure that there are probably less than 100 people in the world still using it. There's nothing wrong with this - this is why Open Source beats closed source for overall hardware support - as long as someone is around using it, and someone else maintaining it, there is no reason to remove support for it.
Does anyone know how much of the PS3's hardware is actually supported? When you run Linux on Cell, is it actually using all of the Cell cores, or is it just using the main (PPC-like) one?
It seems like Cell is probably going to be a lackluster performer, if only the single main processor is used; at that point it's just like using a 3 or 4 year old PowerPC system. But if Linux can support its additional hardware and coprocessors, it seems like you could do some neat stuff with it; I'd think that you could make a nice media-PC frontend on it, for pushing HD video around.
Seems like getting software to take advantage of it, would require changes both to the kernel, and also to GCC, in order to produce optimized binaries for it, not to mention various pieces of software themselves (rewriting for greater parallelizability).
Still, it's a neat hardware platform (that's about all I have nice to say about it, actually), and it's a good bet that at some time in the future, they'll be available inexpensively on the used market. Anything that starts the process of getting better support now, seems like a good thing to me.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With a great article title like "Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance", I figured there must be something really notable about this release - and yet, there isn't. Summary: some things a neglible amount faster, some a negligible amount slower. If the "firehose" feature I've seen is anything like a preview of how submitted articles are reviewed for publication, I'd say an important part of this process would be at least a review of the linked content to determine whether or not it satisfies any reasonable criteria of newsworthiness.
I'm not so much worried about the "science" behind the benchmarks. I'm still wondering about the point of the benchmarks. I can't think of a more boring set of benchmarks than comparing minor revisions of the same kernel on the same hardware. That is, unless there was some reason to believe that one would be faster. Somehow their "LAME" comparison seems appropriate. "In this set of benchmarks, what we are comparing is LAME."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Did you only skip to the last page? If you looked over every benchmark, the new kernel had improved performance in almost every test, save for two of the last three.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You misunderstand the Linux kernel ethos. The idea is to include *everything* "in the kernel", but you only have to compile the parts that you want. That way there is a central place to track all changes and maintain compatibility and consistency between all parts of the kernel, without having to set an internal interfaces in stone.
It's not "bloat" if it's only in the source. Simply put, you don't have to include PS3 support in your binary version. In other words, the only way it affects you is a few extra bytes to download when you want to compile it.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of good stuff in the kernel, but mostly what these benchmarks show is that nothing affecting these particular tasks got broken.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
i thought quite the opposite. though, honestly, after seeing a couple of the graphs, i decided not to read the content. comparing application performance on different versions of the kernel seems rather stupid.. like seeing if your car goes faster when you give it nicer seats. consumer application performance is largely dictated by the application code itself and the hardware it runs on. maybe it can handle multi-user I/O and multi-process scheduling better, but I didn't see much of that here.
It's a bit misleading to say that it gives the kernel PS3 support. What it does give is Cell support and other PS3 hardware support. The Cell is made for a gaming machine but the design itself is for a more general use. They even have blade servers with them. This is serious Internet Business we're talking about with support from IBM.
Right now you only get frame buffer support so even playing serious Internet games is not really enjoyable. No GPU support yet.
What sane person is going to think that Linux is a gaming platform off the bat? And what is even wrong with that? Is someone going to take IBM less seriously now that they are supporting CPUs that are specialized for crunching numbers and give you stunning real time visuals?
bah. start over
Kernel developers regularly hunt elusive speed boosts which can only be detected by specialized benchmark. 2% on something as generic as kernel compilation is fantastic.
Of course the tests probably weren't conducted in a sufficiently scientific way, so the measurement error probably swamps the 2% improvement. If it can be independently repeated, congratulations are definitely in order!
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I can run it on a PS3, but I still can't run it on an Asus A8V motherboard, because there are no working drivers for the onboard SATA controller. Boo.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Can the creators of this technology choose a better word for it? KVM is already widely known as a KVM switch, Keyboard, Video, Mouse. It lets you connect multiple computers to the same monitor,keyboard and mouse and switch between them.
Choosing the same acronym for this new technology is only bound to cause confusion.
AccountKiller
With that kind of performance increase, my Gentoo laptop is going to be screaming along after the release of 2.6.20.
Ok...was that sarcastic enough? With this crowd, one can never quite know.
It's slightly faster.... TO THE MAX!
I've played with PS3 linux. I can tell you, the hypervisor is just that. It virtualizes the PS3 hardware. ...
I don't know about anybody else, but I find this just conceptually fascinating. Where does the hypervisor run from, anyway? Is it in the machine's ROM, so that there's no way to prevent it from booting? (Without irreversible hardware modifications.)
I was just wondering whether it's possible to get rid of it, and boot Linux on the bare metal, or whether the hypervisor is tied into the hardware so tightly, it's impossible to remove and install a new Domain 0 operating system.
Getting Linux to run on the bare metal, 'below' the hypervisor, will be an interesting exercise in what I suspect may be a large part of the future of "unauthorized" computing. I don't think it'll be long before most consumer systems have something like that in place, so it'll be a good intellectual challenge, if nothing else, to see if it can be gotten around.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I also bought a PS3 two weeks ago primarily to develop on the Cell processor. So far, I have written a prototype application that runs 5x faster on the PS3's Cell than on the highest end Woodcrest Xeon at 3.0 GHz. When I am not coding on it, I am also using it as a Blu-ray player. Given all this, plus the fact that the PS3 is a next-gen console (though I don't plan to buy any game), I am probably one of the few to recognize that $500 is dirty cheap for such a polyvant device !
Given that the article, obstensibly about kernel performance, makes no effort to actually cover kernel performance...
I was suckered in; it looked like a worthy topic. Now, I ask myself: Why did I bother?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Installing NoScript and creating a whitelist might be easier.
The Processor is about equivalent to a mid-to-late Pentium III.
No, it's actually about the same as a Powermac G5 at the moment. Read more here.
"Results
Overall Score
PlayStation 3
105.2
Power Mac G5
106.9"