KernelTrap - preemption

Linux: 2.6.9-mm1, What's Merging In 2.6.10 And Beyond

Jeremy — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:31:38 +0000

With the release of 2.6.9-mm1, Andrew Morton [interview] offered a quick status update on a number of patches in his -mm tree [forum] that are 2.6-mainline hopefuls. For example, regarding the much debated reiser4 filesystem [story], Andrew said that he is still "not sure, really. The namespace extensions were disabled, although all the code for that is still present. Linus's filesystem criterion used to be 'once lots of people are using it, preferably when vendors are shipping it'. That's a bit of a chicken and egg thing though. Needs more discussion". And as for Ingo Molnar [interview]'s preemption and low-latency fixups [forum] Andrew offered, "I haven't really thought about it and haven't looked at the patches yet. Hopefully 2.6.10 material."

Other projects specifically mentioned include the sysfs backing store, the ext3 reservations code, the ext3 resize code, kexec and crashdump [story], perfctr, cachefs, cpusets, and the md updates. Read on for Andrew's comments and the complete -mm1 changelog.

Linux: Low Latency and Filesystems

Jeremy — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 02:54:20 +0000

Continuing the earlier discussion about low latency and Ingo Molnar [interview]'s voluntary kernel preemption patch [story], the conversation moved onto the affect a filesystem can have on latency. Specifically, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton [interview] noted that ReiserFS was known to have some latency issues in both the 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels, "resierfs: yes, it's a problem. I 'fixed' it multiple times in 2.4, but the fixes ended up breaking the fs in subtle ways and I eventually gave up." However, he did go on to note, "actually, the 2.4 low-latency patch does still have some reiserfs fixes, so it's probably better than reiserfs in 2.6."

When asked if ext3 was a better choice for low latency work, Andrew Morton replied, "ext3 is certainly better than [reiserfs], but still has a couple of potential problem spots. ext2 is probably the best at this time." Data is continuing to be collected and reviewed by a number of kernel developers, so the more noticeable latency issues in the 2.6 kernel will likely be addressed soon.