Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of LinuxKernel2.6.
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| Newer page: | version 28 | Last edited on Sunday, August 7, 2005 8:26:26 pm | by CraigBox | |
| Older page: | version 26 | Last edited on Sunday, March 20, 2005 9:44:24 am | by DanielLawson | Revert |
@@ -26,8 +26,9 @@
!!!New Features
The 2.6 tree adds two features that can lead to signifigant performance gains. The first one is reverse mapping of physical to virtual memory, which provides a better solution for paging as the kernel can now reuse pages allocated for a particular task rather than having to reallocate each time said task requires swap. The second one allows processes to be preempted anywhere in the kernel which reduces the average response time to 1ms, meaning the kernel spends less time idle under pressure, and so visible performance is, under certain circumstances, greatly improved. Other cool things added in the new kernel include the merging of [ALSA], which has finally superceded OSS/Free] as the preferred sound driver for Linux. For those of you unfamiliar with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, it beats down OSS in pretty much every respect, as well as adding support for multiple channel muxing on sound cards which support it, and supports a whole lot more chipsets then OSS could ever dream of doing.
+Another new feature in the 2.6 kernel was the addition of selectable IO schedulers. These control the way the kernel schedules reads and writes to the disk subsystem. See LinuxIoScheduler for more information
!!!Caveat Emptor
It took kernel 2.4 about 14 patches and three different VM systems before a "stable" stable version. 2.6 has gone through several months of test kernels, but the design methodology still says "release it to primetime and let the users do the testing" (otherwise, no-one would!) Running a beta kernel is not reccomended for any server or otherwise important box. If in doubt, wait six months. It should be fine to run on a workstation until then. There are some cases, however, when a [RAID] or [SCSI] controller isn't supported by the 2.4 series kernels, so if you want to use one of them in a server, your best bet is upgrading (carefully) to 2.6.
@@ -50,9 +51,9 @@
----
For anyone who tries a 2.6.x kernel early in the game, here is a place to record your experiences.
-'I have tried (2.5).62 through .66. .62 appears to be the most stable with .66 second. I do run a lot of [OpenGL] apps (read: [Quake] III Arena) though, and it's more likely to be the Nvidia driver thats causing my system instability. As far as performance goes: 2.5.65 with the ingo-linus scheduler was by far the fastest in interactive applications. In general I get about a 30% increase in framerate (under glx) but of course this comes at the cost of stability. [WineX
] also feels a lot faster (thought there is no framerate gain according to ingame displays - I've tried CS and Ghost Recon] - [TomHibbert]'
+'I have tried (2.5).62 through .66. .62 appears to be the most stable with .66 second. I do run a lot of [OpenGL] apps (read: [Quake] III Arena) though, and it's more likely to be the Nvidia driver thats causing my system instability. As far as performance goes: 2.5.65 with the ingo-linus scheduler was by far the fastest in interactive applications. In general I get about a 30% increase in framerate (under glx) but of course this comes at the cost of stability. [Cedega
] also feels a lot faster (thought there is no framerate gain according to ingame displays - I've tried CS and Ghost Recon] - [TomHibbert]'
'Tried a generic 2.6.0 from kernel.org on Fedora Core release 1 (Yarrow) using SoftwareRaid. When running the make install it complains when creating the initrd image and the raid1 module not being present. The bzImage loads fine when testing it manually, and seems to run sofar. -- GerwinVanDeSteeg'
Compiled 2.6.5 under Debian Sarge, monolithic (no modules, compiled in everything I use) and pre-emptable. It feels very responsive! Been using it for a few days already. - zcat(1)
