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Removing the Big Kernel Lock

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wait-i-thought-locks-made-it-secure dept.

Corrado writes "There is a big discussion going on over removing a bit of non-preemptable code from the Linux kernel. 'As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptable BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptable code again. "This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL.'"

3 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Is this story in English? by Evildonald · · Score: 0, Redundant

    No really. Is it? BK-Whatsit?

  2. Mod parent up by HiThere · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Mod parent up

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    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  3. Re:I don't understand by MichaelSmith · · Score: 0, Redundant

    My laptop is low on ram (256 MB) and it stops responding under load all the time. The reason seems to be disk saturation caused by firefox, but that shouldn't make it not be able to scroll windows.

    I run netbsd on some systems and have noticed that performance degrades much more gracefully than linux.

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    http://michaelsmith.id.au