ALS 2000 Abstract
SMP Scalability Comparisons of Linux¨ Kernels 2.2.14 and 2.3.99
Ray Bryant, Bill Hartner, Qi He, and Ganesh Venkitachalam, IBM Linux Technology Center
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 SPECweb99ª. 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.
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