Con Kolivas, a practicing doctor in Australia, has written a benchmarking tool called ConTest which has proven to be tremendously useful to kernel developers, having been designed to compare the performance of different versions of the Linux kernel.He was kind enough to speak with KernelTrap, explaining how he got started on this project, what makes his benchmark unique, and how to interpret the resulting output. Comparing the 2.5 development kernel to the 2.4 stable kernel, Con says, “a good 2.5 kernel (and that’s not all of them) feels faster than 2.4 in most ways and this bodes well for 2.6.” The interesting results from his frequent benchmarks back up this statement.
Con also describes his high performance patchset for the 2.4 stable kernel, currently at version 2.4.19-ck9. This patchset adds a number of performance boosting patches ideal for a desktop environment, such as the O(1) scheduler, kernel preemption, low latency and compressed caching. Read the full interview at KernelTrap.
You seem to have a really good grasp on some of the fundemental kernel interactive/loaded performance issues. Nice to see that seasoned veterans are listening; this makes me think about doing the same sort of testing that you have been doing (especially if people will listen).
I like the idea of auto-tuning, if it can be worked out and proves to be a benefit. How much code would be added to have a compile time option to choose a magic number or an algorithm?
Awesome article!
Dan