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At the core of these enhancements is a new process scheduler. The process scheduler in the kernel divides CPU resources among system processes. The performance of the scheduler directly impacts system responsiveness and process latency. In the v2.6 kernel, the new 0(1) scheduler incorporates new algorithms that can substantially increase system performance, especially interactive tasks. The 0(1) scheduler can penalize CPU-hogging processes, improves process prioritization, and provides consistent performance across all processes. Also new in v2.6 are two new I/O schedulers. The scheduler used in the v2.6 kernel by default, the anticipatory scheduler, brings much improved handling of I/O scheduling, ensuring that processes get I/O time when necessary, without unnecessary queuing. Also present is the deadline scheduler, which assigns an expiration to requests using three queues, while anticipatory scheduler attempts to anticipate process I/O requests before they are actually requested.
There has been much debate over the scheduler used in this kernel, and there is support for both schedulers, defined at boot time with options passed to the kernel. The importance of scheduler performance cannot be overstressed. My tests show that the anticipatory scheduler in v2.6 surpasses the v2.4 scheduler handily. Some of my tests show a tenfold performance increase. For instance, a simple read of a 500MB file during a streaming write with a 1MB block size on my Xeon-based test system took 37 seconds with v2.4.23, and 3.9 seconds with v2.6. The deadline scheduler also performs quite well, but may not be as fluid for certain workloads as the anticipatory scheduler. Either way, the new process and I/O schedulers blow v2.4’s schedulers out of the water.
In addition to the new scheduler, v2.6 has plenty of other major architectural changes. The module handling code has been completely rewritten, requiring a new set of userspace module utilities and mkinitrd packages to function. These can be found as updates to most major Linux distributions or via download. The new modutils and module kernel code is much smoother than that found in v2.4, and permits a kernel to be compiled without support for module unloading to ensure the integrity of the production kernel.
Clocking the New Kernel
To test the new kernel, I opted for scenarios that would be most appropriate for real-world users. Testing individual portions of the kernel, such as disk I/O, memory management, and so on could be interesting, but what does it mean for the overall system performance? In order to get the big picture, I selected a few tests representative of expected server workloads and used them to compare the performance of the v2.6 and v2.4 kernels.
Tests were run on three separate hardware platforms: Intel Xeon (x86), Intel Itanium (IA-64), and AMD Opteron (x86_64). The x86 tests were conducted on an IBM eServer x335 1U rack-mount server with dual 3.06GHz P4 Xeon processors and 2GB of RAM. The Itanium tests were run on an IBM eServer x450 3U rack-mount server with dual 1.5GHz Itanium2 processors and 2GB of RAM. And the Opteron tests were run on a Newisys 4300 3U rack-mount server with dual 2.2GHz Opteron 848 processors and 2GB of RAM.
The base OS distribution used was Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server v3.0, but the kernel testing relied on custom kernels compiled on each server. The v2.4 tests utilized the official v2.4.23 kernel, and the v2.6 tests utilized the official v2.6.0 kernel. Only the required modules and options were compiled, and there were no other modifications made to the kernels, other than those necessary for compilation on the various platforms, such as the x86_64 patches for AMD64 from x86-64.org.
The file-sharing test was designed to mimic a standard Samba server workload, and is based on Samba v3.0.1 with local authentication. The test harness utilized the smbtorture tools included in the Samba package and was run over Gigabit Ethernet. The tests were conducted with a simulation of 12 SMB clients communicating with a central server. The results of these tests are almost too good to believe.
On the Xeon system, the v2.4 kernel pushed 38.85MBps on average, and the v2.6 kernel pushed 67.30MBps -- a 73 percent improvement. The Itanium tests show similar performance differences between the kernels, giving v2.6 a 52 percent gain, albeit with smaller overall figures. And on the Opteron system, which really showed its muscle in this test, the results were a respectable 49.37MBps on the v2.4 kernel and an impressive 72.92MBps under v2.6, an increase of roughly 48 percent.
The performance gains seen in the Samba tests are likely related to the vastly improved scheduler and I/O subsystem in the v2.6 kernel. Disk I/O and network I/O form the core of this test, and the performance improvements in the v2.6 kernel are very visible here.
The database tests were also enlightening. The test scenario was based on MySQL v3.23.58 and was run with the sql-bench test suite provided by MySQL. All tests were run from a remote server to remove the impact of the client suite running on the same server. In these tests the v2.6 kernel handily beat the v2.4 kernel. The numbers in the chart represent the total amount of time it took the systems to complete eight test procedures, but it does not show the individual numbers from each tested procedure. All eight tests in the sql-bench package were run on both kernels on all three hardware platforms.
Across the board, the v2.6 kernel outperformed the v2.4 kernel in the database tests, especially on the Itanium box, where it posted a speed increase of 23 percent (a 519-second lead) over the v2.4 kernel. On the Xeon platform, v2.6 showed almost a 13 percent gain (a 200-second lead) over v2.4. And on Opteron, it registered a 29 percent speed increase (a 415-second lead) over v2.4. The most impressive individual test was table inserts, showing the v2.6 kernel providing a 10 percent performance increase (with a 100-second lead) over v2.4 on Xeon, with even better results found on the Opteron and Itanium platforms.
The Web server tests also showed significant improvement. The static page test used a 21.5KB HTML page with two 25KB images served by Apache 2.0.48. The test was measured in requests per second using Apache’s ab benchmarking tool. The Xeon tests show the v2.6 kernel outperforming v.2.4 by just under 1,000 requests per second, a 40 percent increase. The Itanium tests showed v2.6 providing a 47 percent performance increase, while the Opteron tests showed a 7 percent increase. It should be noted that the Opteron system outperformed the other two servers by more than 1,000 requests per second with the v2.4 kernel, and the smaller increase may be due to network bandwidth constraints imposed on the server. In retrospect, I believe that if I upped the network connectivity of the Newisys box with bonded Gigabit Ethernet NICs, I could push it even faster.
