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Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

3 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Big speedups for media workstations.. by delire · · Score: 4, Informative
    This 'Per-backing-device writeback' is pretty significant. I'm sure the feature film and database industries will love it especially:

    The new system has much better performance in several workloads: A benchmark with two processes doing streaming writes to a 32 GB file to 5 SATA drives pushed into a LVM stripe set, XFS was 40% faster, and Btrfs 26% faster. A sample ffsb workload that does random writes to files was found to be about 8% faster on a simple SATA drive during the benchmark phase. File layout is much smoother on the vmstat stats. A SSD based writeback test on XFS performs over 20% better as well, with the throughput being very stable around 1GB/sec, where pdflush only manages 750MB/sec and fluctuates wildly while doing so. Random buffered writes to many files behave a lot better as well, as does random mmap'ed writes. A streaming vs random writer benchmark went from a few MB/s to ~120 MB/s. In short, performance improves in many important workloads.

  2. Re:does KSM mean the death of Xen? by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

    If KSM puts the KVM module on par with Xen in terms of performance then I think the writing is on the wall for Xen's demise.

    No. Not at all. KSM saves memory but hurts performance. It shares memory across virtual machines to save memory.

    Xen can't share memory across virtual machines, it's just not put together like that.

    Performance is about identical for KVM and XEN.

  3. Re:ATI support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 2D specs were released in September 2007. The 3D specs were released in January 2009. Drivers do not write themselves immediately just because the specs are out, it still takes some time. But it's getting there, and they won't go away like the closed drivers will, the moment the manufacturer feels it's no longer profitable to maintain them.