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Kernel 2.6.31 To Speed Up Linux Desktop
Dan Jones writes "As the Linux community looks forward to another kernel release, the kernel hackers have been working on improving the memory management so that the X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. The result is an improved desktop experience. Benchmarks on memory-tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. Another improvement coming with 2.6.31 is kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards, enabling faster user switching and a more seamless startup experience. Peripheral developments that will also improve the Linux desktop experience include support for the new USB 3.0 specification and a new Firewire stack. Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!"
Linus reads XKCD? http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/supported_features.png
MS takes the drivers back to user mode after touting the kernel-mode as a performance plus.
Based on my experience with 2008/Win 7 and ATI, I think the display drivers belong firmly in user mode.
I've never had my OS punk out because of a graphics bluescreen. The desktop manger and explorer may have needed a restart, but no data ever stopped streaming or got corrupted.
At this rate I'm starting to question if we'll ever have a 2.7 "alpha/beta" series since all the major new features above and beyond stand-alone device drivers seem to be going right into the current branch.
Flip I sure hope debian, will jump on this, for the next release.
From TFA:
The result is an improved desktop experience; benchmarks on memory tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. That means X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure.
Furthermore, memory flushing benchmarks in a file server shows the number of major faults going from 50 to 3 during 10 per cent cache hot reads.
And on next paragraph...
Linux foundner Linus Torvalds, first developed the operating system for his desktop and it rose to promince as a commodity Unix server.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I can honestly say that the system does feel a lot snappier, more responsive, and just overall a much more pleasant user experience. Everything's just a lot smoother. The kernel team is doing a pretty awesome job of speeding things up. Kudos.
Phoronix has published benchmarks of an ubuntu system with kernel 2.6.31-rc5
Just like folks at Apple realized with their OS X, we in the Linux world, need an alternative to X. I heard that Google Chrome OS will get rid of it entirely. I would like to hear from anyone who disagrees.
I honestly don't know, why is it needed? Isn't this the third one in about 5 years now?
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
RAM is cheap and I have plenty of it. What about improving desktop performance when memory is not a limiting resource?
Honestly, there's something very wrong with a current state of Linux desktop when Windows 7 GUI runs faster that KDE 4.
Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!
Linux has been on the 2.6 line for what? 6 years?
From the kernelnewbies article:
With the HD5850 and HD5870 weeks away (don't buy a new card till they're out, you'll hate yourself!), this means you have to be three GENERATIONS behind the curve for this yet unreleased kernel feature to be of use.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Why does this matter, really? Linux is a server OS, why are they spending any time on useless trivia? Compare the number of working linux boxes used for servers versus desktops, and ask the same question again.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm runing linux desktop on box with shitload gigabytes of free RAM and GTK still render spin edit slow like hell.
Try putting 100 (or so) GTK spin edits on one window an run it. 45s to be fully displayed (Intel Atom, 1GB ram). The same in win32 on windows XP and on the same machine - 2s. But still, >500 MB of free RAM on both systems.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9554#c12
Comment #12 From Alasdair G Kergon 2009-07-01 10:47:44 -------
As of 2.6.31-rc1, write barriers are supported by most device-mapper targets.
(Just dm-raid1 and dm-mpath still need finishing.)
How is it that they ship a product to market and have to constantly patch it? I thought real software never got patched.
May I be the first to say it's about time the kernel devs paid some attention to desktop users. Servers aren't the only ones out there running Linux!
OSS wasn't free nor sophisticated enough, so the more complicated ALSA was created to replace it. However ALSA was too much of a pain of a butt to code apps for, so several competing, yet incompatible sound daemons were developed. The sound daemons have their own bugs, and when combined with the bugs in ALSA result in even more buggy behavior. So, in most cases the most reliable option is to use OSS emulation and direct applications to use OSS which ALSA was supposed to replace to begin with.
The advent of Windows 7 in October may drive Linux's desktop market share down even futher.
It's not all doom and gloom for the penguin, however...
Thank goodness. I was so worried and depressed.
Aren't arguments about Linux being broken on the desktop red herrings? (linux, tux, herrings, red herrings?... ba boom tsh, I'll be here all week) The argument should be whether Linux, in my case Ubuntu, allows a Luser to work on h/is/er desktop. Positing one hypothetical, or specific case, after another and then proclaiming Linux is broken on the desktop is silly, as you pointed out. Linux now, compared to the early edition of Mandrake I first installed, is a working desktop OS.
Any OS intended for the desktop is trying to perform as a calibrated solution to an arbitrarily established target while trying to incorporate new features reflecting the advances of hardware manufactures. Moore's Law can be made to suggest the moving target any desktop OS has to aim at while not wasting limited resources developing features that the market might relegate to the margins. Linux has done, and continues to do, a great job of staying on target but will never meet the demands of all users, including those who want a, more or less, marginal feature made mainstream. Stating the bleeding obvious the strength of Linux and Open Source is anyone who wants a feature develop that feature given it's feasibility and a willingness to spend the necessary resources.
All large corporations, especially widely held corporations, are bound and driven by the profit motive. Limited resources and profit expectations don't always allow the best of all possible worlds.
ideopath @ play
Does that have anything to do with the forthcoming release of the N900?
A "memory-tight desktops" is a distant concept nowadays. On the other hand, this is strangely suited for a small device running X.
The X API is totally unsuitable for writing flicker-free applications. The main problem is the draw-as-you-go approach foisted on you. There are no frame breaks and no way to tell the server when it's ok to flush the graphics to the card. Sure, you can write ugly workarounds. OpenGL implements its own drawlists and it's possible to get it to dump them in sync with vretrace. But that does not help someone working with the X protocol. And outside OpenGL it isn't even possible at all, because current X still does not provide any way to detect a retrace; all that code is hidden in the binary GL blob drivers. XSync extension was intended exactly for this, it has been around for over 20 years and is STILL not working!
Yes, I'd dearly love to rewrite X. Use drawlists, like OpenGL does, the better to integrate with acceleration pipes. Double-buffer, or at least make sure no drawing is done between retraces. But everybody is so stuck on preserving X, that this is very very hard. Yes, kernel support for R600 is coming, but that isn't going to be an actual driver; it's just a forwarding interface to the card's IO ports with locking. I'd still have to figure out the formats it wants and write a 3D driver for every card. And heaven forbid you mention that 3D drivers should be in the kernel; you get all kinds of people saying that it would make them hard to port. Well, gee people; the current state of affairs makes those ugly undocumented drivers in X damn hard to port too!
Yeah, I'm worked up. The state of graphics support on Linux just makes me tear my hear out.
I undervolt my laptop. Up until the most recent kernel releases, this could be done by simply loading a small module into the kernel. A group of people on Ubuntu Forums would work together... one person would compile a module and put it up for others to download.
Currently, the way phc is handled was changed, and it requires a recompile of the whole kernel... please either include this module in the kernel or let it be loaded seperately again! If I wanted to compile my own kernels, it'd be running Gentoo.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Earlier today I checked to see if ATI has X1650 drivers for Windows 7. They consider my card legacy and they do have a driver but I have a feeling there won't be many new releases.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:FGIH_jA8GfcJ:kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_31+http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_31&hl=en&client=mozilla&gl=us&strip=1 (text only).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The "New isn't automatically better just because" has pretty much turned into "New is worse than old" and "If I can't come up with a reason to use new stuff, there is none"
But well. The Daily Show, Southpark, etc... Pretty much all the major titles from Comedy Central can be found legally online, I want to use fullscreen flash for those.
I also want to use it for fullscreen Youtube (there are occasional good, long videos. Google tech talks, for example.). In addition, all the major tv channels here in Finland have some sort of online service where you can watch their shows for free. I don't recall what technologies each of them uses (and can't be bothered to check right now), but I think they use flash.
That said... Fullscreen flash works very well for me. I have Adobe's own flash plugin on firefox on 64 bit Ubuntu and have no problem at all with watching fullscreen flash videos smoothly. I have pretty decent computer (4 gigs of ram, quadcore) and haven't ever bothered to check how much of it's processing power fullscreen flash requires. But it works.
The major problem actually is that I sometimes can't leave fullscreen flash. Nothing works. (esc, alt+tab, all worthless) I have to ctrl+alt+f2, login, killall firefox and then return to ctrl+alt+f7. It's pretty annoying.
Okay, why do I not have a problem with this? I watch BBC iPlayer fullscreen flash on my 46" 1080p TV from Linux, and apart from the low resolution of the flash stream (even in high quality mode), it is perfect.
Devs make sweeping changes to critical kernel code so that a particular user space application performs better.
Hurd please save us
Stop adding more and more useless heuristics. Just switch to use BrainFuck Scheduler and give your X a higher priority. Keep the kernel dumb, it can't out-smart you.
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/bfs/
On any decent machine (2Ghz+ with 1Gb+ RAM), I haven't had any problem with full screen flash. I did a while back, when it was buggier. Most of my machines have been 64 bit (Slamd64). For a while I ran the 32 bit Firefox just to have the Flash player work, but that's been resolved for a while with no complaints.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And that's over a LAN connection. OTOH the NX stuff doesn't work just fine, as it dictates that you run the ssh server a very specific way. Plus its proprietary and relatively difficult to setup.
By comparison the remote Windows and Mac protocols are a dream. They allow things like multi-user sharing of a single app instance... without resorting to 1980s raster technology like VNC. About 5 years ago I hoped NX would get the ability to share sessions without using VNC, but I've since given up and the NX authors say that the limitation is X11's fault.
To sort of summarize here: You have to be a very sheltered Unix user if you think remote X compares well with the standard bearers on the desktop.
Oh, dear.
Well when X applications become usable over a LAN link let me know, mmkay?
When X permits efficient sharing of a window or desktop between multiple users in a teleconference, do let me know!
(Even the NX people say that X prevents this feature.)
Because I won't be holding my breath for it and you shouldn't either.
It should also be noted that this release will (finally) fix a problem with Linux rebooting on MacBook (Pro) 5,1 and up.
But distro bloat makes it slower. Bizarre idea of progress.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
clusters.
hypothetically with lsb ver5 we might be able to have closed software vendors publish a single binary package which would install and run everywhere.
while linux is in the single percentages the need to support multiple distributions multiples the work for closed source vendors. making it that much less profitable and that much less unlikely they will release.
jazz jackrabbit was released in 1994.. try zone66, you had to boot into it cause it ran in protected mode without a dos extender. and it was seriously fast and smooth with fullscreen scrolling and many many sprites on a 16mhz 386...
cbs.com video's in full screen are horrifically broken with Twinview (Nvidia proprietary driver implementing dual head). It full-screens a single screen (properly), but then centers the video between the monitors, so you can only watch one half of the video. Other video sites get it right (Youtube, Hulu), why can't CBS?
I blame both CBS and Adobe, but particularly Adobe.(CBS shouldn't be able to mess up like that.)
(Running fullscreen flash video in Debian on a regular basis. It's a real processor hog, though.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Top Tip: Ctrl-Shift-Esc (IIRC) will run xkill. The cursor changes to a skull and crossbones - just click on the misbehaving window and it'll be killed for you. It'll probably take firefox with it, but it's still easier...
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves