[Q] Which kernel + special patches ???

[Q] Which kernel + special patches ???

[Till Immanuel Patzschke]

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

Re: [Q] Which kernel + special patches ???

[Robert Love]

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 03:24, Till Immanuel Patzschke wrote:

> 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?

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 :)

> Many thanks for the help and Happy Thanksgiving!

Same to you.

	Robert Love

Re: [Q] Which kernel + special patches ???

[Hanna Linder]

--On Thursday, November 28, 2002 12:24:14 AM -0800 Till Immanuel Patzschke 
<tip@inw.de> wrote:

> 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?

Hello Till,

	This is a great question to ask on the Linux Scalability
mailing list: lse-tech@lists.sourceforge.net. 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

>
> 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 ???

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