SMP scalability comparisons of linux ® kernels 2.2.14 and 2.3.99

  • Authors:
  • Ray Bryant;Bill Hartner;Qi He;Ganesh Venkitachalam

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM ® Linux Technology Center, IBM Austin;IBM ® Linux Technology Center, IBM Austin;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA;VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • ALS'00 Proceedings of the 4th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 4
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The Linux 2.4 kernel should provide significantly better SMP scalability than is available in the 2.2 series. While the development of the 2.4 kernel is still continuing, performance studies on the 2.3.99 kernels can be used as an indicator of what the performance of the 2.4 kernel will be like. In this paper, we compare performance and SMP scalability of Linux 2.2.14 and Linux 2.3.99 on the Intel® 32-bit platform using four benchmarks. Three of these are targeted to specific system components; the fourth is SPECweb99TM. SMP scaling for these benchmarks is shown to be significantly better with 2.3.99 than it is with 2.2.14. This should translate into significantly better SMP scaling (and hence additional raw performance on SMP systems) for applications running under Linux 2.4.