“Ingo Molnar recently posted a patch to the Linux Kernel mailing list that, in his own words, is “a pretty radical rewrite of the Linux scheduler”. He includes links to the patch for 2.5.2-pre6 and 2.4.17. The stated goals are to retain the good things from existing scheduler, fully O(1) scheduling, ‘perfect’ SMP scalability, better SMP affinity.” Read the rest of the story, and the whole email Ingo sent to the mailing list, at KernelTrap.org. The article includes information regarding the gain in performance, new features etc that the new Kernel Scheduler brings. This is indeed great news for the Linux users, developers and performance hungry admins.
New Kernel Scheduler Proposal & Patch For Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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He certainly is developing this rather quickly… Last night I downloaded like an A0 patch. This morning I downloaded a B2 patch, and now I’ve just downloaded a B4 patch.
So far the A0 and B2 (I might be off a little on the numbers) didn’t work, some services conflicted with the patch, postgres and mysql in particular seem to not get along with the new scheduler, resulting in a crash as soon as the server starts. An error about not being able to handle a null kernel pointer (or something like that). I’ve tried this on 2 different systems, both are smp. So maybe it’s just an smp issue? I haven’t tried it on a UP system yet though.
Anyway, so be careful when trying this out, make sure you can boot an old kernel if it doesn’t work out (via lilo). I was able to at least boot into single user mode though.
Anyone know where I can send bug reports?
-Hiryu
Send it directly to Ingo. I think he appreciates every serious reports.
I really recommend the slashdot story on this. Lots of good posts.