Which kernel + special patches ???

Dear list,

following this list for quite a while now raised the above question. To get more specific:
Given an SMP system with many thousand processes and a potentially high network and IO load, what is the best combination of source and patch, to make best use of SMP, keep load low and throughput high?

Is it 2.4.x + rmap or aa or O(1) or ac or some combination OR ist it 2.5.x + one (or more) of the above patches ???

Many thanks for the help and Happy Thanksgiving!

Immanuel

Personally, I use 2.4-ac which includes rmap, the O(1) scheduler, and a couple performance tweaks like read-latency and irq balancing.

But I have seen some excellent numbers from 2.4-aa, so you may want to try that out, especially now that Andrea has the O(1) scheduler in there. 2.4-aa has a large collection of performance patches. Andrew Morton says that is the best performing 2.4 kernel he has seen.

Your best bet is 2.6 when it comes out :)

Same to you.

Robert Love

Hello Till,

This is a great question to ask on the Linux Scalability
mailing list: [email protected]. We are devoted to helping make Linux scale to large systems. Check out our work at:

http://lse.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lse

In my opinion 2.5 has more new functionality for scalability and increased performance than 2.4 does right now. Since 2.5 is the development kernel for new features and 2.4 is the stable series. Expect to see backports of the best 2.5 features to 2.4 after they have proven themselves.

Please let us know the results of running on your very large systems.

Hanna Linder
IBM Linux Technology Center