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Linux 3.0 Will Be Faster Than 2.6.39

Posted by timothy on from the phrase-in-person-hours-saved dept.

sfcrazy writes "While we were thinking that the announcement of 3.x branch was nothing more than Linus' mood swing, it seems there is more to it. Linus wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, '3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39 due to the other changes made (ie the read-ahead), so yes, the regression itself is fixed.'"

1 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. prefetch() by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to LWN article about removing prefetch, the linux kernel 3.0.0 will have a bunch of prefetch() calls removed from the kernel.

    Apparently they were supposed to provide hints to the CPU to prefetch the next item in linked lists, but the hardware does a superior job of it without the hints. Especially in the case of the next item being NULL, which was the majority of the cases.

    A very small speedup to be sure, but it's not like there are many low hanging huge wins left.