[TriLUG] Re: Fedora Core 2 Test 1 (FC2t1) initial impressions

[Nathan Conrad]

Theer are two major things that the 2.6 kernel does very closely with
glibc: threading and syscalls.

On newer x86 CPUs, and maybe some other architectures the method that
userspaces uses to make syscalls has changed a lot. It should be much
faster now.

The method of creating threads is different too. I'm pretty sure that
with 2.4, threads we just sub-processes and the kernel didn't know
that they were actually threads. With 2.6, the kernel knows that a
thread is a thread and is able to schedule time for threads more
appropriately and efficiently (fewer context changes, I think).  This
new technology is called NPTL, Natix Posix Thread Library.

Last, but not least, there is the preempible kernel. It allows the
kernel to be preempted when it is taking to long to do something. This
especially helps reduce latency while doing I/O with slow devices.

To me, the new features of 2.6 outweigh the performance gains. I never
ran 2.4 long enough on this laptop to see if it was much slower; I
installed 2.5 soon after getting the machine.

-Nathan

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 09:14:58AM -0500, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Lance A. Brown wrote:
> 
> >  From what I've been reading, the 2.6 kernel is a major win in desktop 
> > performance.  It really is *that* much faster than 2.4!
> 
> I was chatting with someone that has an @redhat.com email address and he 
> was saying that there was a lot more collaboration between the glibc & 
> kernel components this time which accounts for more performance gains than 
> the press has been giving credit for.  The libs are all supposed to be 
> prelinked now.  Mozilla, OOo, Gnome & KDE all have significant performance 
> gains of their own on top of the kernel & glibc improvements.  So the 
> gains are really compounded across multiple key components.
> 
> It's worth pointing out that I was using KDE, not Gnome.  Gnome is the 
> default desktop so I can't really comment on how much difference there 
> might be for the more typical FC2 user.
> 
> -- 
> TriLUG mailing list        : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> TriLUG Organizational FAQ  : http://trilug.org/faq/
> TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
> TriLUG PGP Keyring         : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc

-- 
Nathan J. Conrad                     Campus phone #5930
301 Scott hall, UNC Charlotte        http://bungled.net
GPG: F4FC 7E25 9308 ECE1 735C  0798 CE86 DA45 9170 3112
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/attachments/20040213/8302d138/attachment.pgp>