Having recently returned from the Linux kernel summit, Ingo Molnar and Peter Zijlstra sent out some performance updates to the Completely Fair Scheduler:

"Our main focus has been on simplifications and performance - and as part of that we've also picked up some ideas from Roman Zippel's 'Really Fair Scheduler' patch as well and integrated them into CFS. We'd like to ask people go give these patches a good workout, especially with an eye on any interactivity regressions."

He noted that some of the changes included removing features that had proved unecessary. "while keeping the things that worked out fine, like sleeper fairness." Ingo posted some results from the lmbench benchmark noting around a 16% speedup on both the 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. He added, "we are now a bit faster than the O(1) scheduler was under v2.6.22 - even on 32-bit. The main speedup comes from the avoidance of divisions (or shifts) in the wakeup and context-switch fastpaths."

In a recent lkml thread, Linus Torvalds was involved in a discussion about mounting filesystems with the noatime option for better performance, "'noatime,data=writeback' will quite likely be *quite* noticeable (with different effects for different loads), but almost nobody actually runs that way." He noted that he set O_NOATIME when writing git, "and it was an absolutely huge time-saver for the case of not having 'noatime' in the mount options. Certainly more than your estimated 10% under some loads." The discussion then looked at using the relatime mount option to improve the situation, "relative atime only updates the atime if the previous atime is older than the mtime or ctime. Like noatime, but useful for applications like mutt that need to know when a file has been read since it was last modified." Ingo Molnar stressed the significance of fixing this performance issue, "I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_." He submitted some patches to improve relatime, and noted about atime:

"It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'"

Avi Kivity [interview] announced significant performance improvements and support for running 32-bit Windows Vista as a guest within the latest release of KVM. Originally merged into the 2.6.20 mainline Linux kernel [story], KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, "a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions". Regarding the new release, Avi announced:

"The happy theme of today's kvm is the significant performance improvements, brought to you by a growing team of developers. I've clocked kbuild at within 25% of native. This release also introduces support for 32-bit Windows Vista."