Friday, December 10, 2010

Another Linux Improvement Patches Attempt

There's always room for improvement. I think that quotes also apply to Linux Kernel development. Every new kernel release always tries to bring new features, but behind all those new features, there's always an attempt to improve performance.

Several weeks ago, Phoronix wrote an interesting article about 200 lines of code which could improve desktop performance by automatically creating task groups per TTY. While this patch set has done a great job, another attempt has been made to further improve it.

This month, Andrea has updated his patch set against 2.6.37-rc1 and based on benchmarking done by Phoronix using Phoronix Test Suite, it does give an improvement compared to other kernels used on the test process. So, what's the idea behind this patch set?

Taken from Phoronix's article:
The Transparent Hugepage Support in the Linux kernel works by reducing the number of TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) entries that such applications need and at the same time increasing the cap that a TLB cache can provide.
For more information about THS, please have a look on article by LWN and also documentation in the Kernel.

I think this will be released in 2.6.37 or probably in 2.6.38 if it's too late for 2.6.37. I'm looking forward to see more improvements in the future Yahoo

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