• Linux to gain significant speed boost thanks to small kernel patch
    44 replies, posted
I didn't say I was an expert, I just noted that zsh is master race and bash is terrible and should stop being included with all distributions.
Why do people bother using bash for this anyway? Just grab the kernel and the patch, compile it, and you're good to go. With a newer and better kernel. Why do the same thing with bash, if you can optimize the kernel instead?
Because bash itself isn't doing anything with that script. You're putting stuff into /sys/ which is a kernel file system like /proc/
They're essentially the same thing, but the other one doesn't require compiling the kernel after you've patched it.
I don't even have a /sys/fs/cgroup folder on my Arch laptop.
[QUOTE=FPtje;26152607]I don't even have a /sys/fs/cgroup folder on my Arch laptop.[/QUOTE] Yeah, /sys/fs is weird, on my Arch installation I used /dev. Just mkdir /dev/cgroup, or even /mnt/cgroup, but that's a but funky. Just remember to chmod it properly and whatnot.
Since my kernel didn't have control groups compiled into it I decided to apply the patch instead. The performance gain is actually quite noticable in applications such as firefox. I also just realized that the kernel I'm using now has control groups enabled so the patch is now unnecessary (or so I've been led to believe)
Just tested this on an OpenSUSE VM. Feels [i]much[/i] faster.
This is great if you have a netbook/laptop, for desktops you will only notice it when something is using a lot of cpu (a compile, booting up etc). I personally use the userspace version as it has less overhead compared to the kernel version and does not require a reboot. [editline]21st November 2010[/editline] I forgot to add that this kernel patch has been added to some custom android kernels and REALLY REALLY improves android when multiple apps are running if you use CFS and not BFS in your kernel.
what's weird is that on the latest zen-kernel, I don't have cgroups compiled into it (I think), and the bash thing doesn't work anymore. complains about the directory in /dev (i'm on Debian) not containing cgroup/cpu or something. still runs faster, though. zen-kernel + cgroup patch/bash hack could make my netbook run at a reasonable speed :keke:
Will this patch be available in a pre-compiled form for Linux noobs who download the .deb files to update their kernels?
[QUOTE=Pixel Heart;26258771]Will this patch be available in a pre-compiled form for Linux noobs who download the .deb files to update their kernels?[/QUOTE] It's going to be included in future kernel updates, IIRC.
[QUOTE=Ayra;26263347]It's going to be included in future kernel updates, IIRC.[/QUOTE] Sounds good. I'm running the latest 2.6.37-RC3, and wondered if it's already been added, or if I have to wait longer. I don't want to waste several hours searching through tons and tons of change logs... -_-
Anyone got any statistics comparing the speed increase between vanilla kernel, kernel with this patch/the bash fix, and a kernel with BFS instead of CFS? I'm running BFS and the performance increase is similar, but I can't work out which is faster for my netbook.
The difference with vary per system. BFS tends to be faster anyway, this CFS patch just puts CFS in league with BFS in terms of performance but CFS is believed to be more stable and consistent and scales up better than BFS. If you google CFS vs BFS you will find a lot of benchmarks in regards to that, there are not really many at all with the new patch yet so I would advise getting a benchmark script and doing your own. Just to clarify, this patch does not improve general performance, it improves responsiveness when under high load, this means your browser won't lag as much when encoding a video or compiling a kernel. So quite how you can benchmark that I am not sure.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.