Some followups from last week

Andrew Morton sent us a note stating that last week's discussion of the new API for putting processes to sleep missed an important objective of that work. The new interface is nice, but what he was really setting out to do was to improve wakeup performance. The new code removes waiting processes from the wait queue immediately at wakeup time, rather than letting the processes remove themselves whenever they get around to it. The result is that subsequent wakeups, if they come quickly, will run faster because they do not need to deal with processes that have already been awakened.

We also mentioned, last week, a posting on the leading-edge features used in the TPC benchmark results posted by HP. Lest anybody think that HP was using a highly patched, special-purpose kernel, they have posted a followup stating that a stock Red Hat kernel (from Advanced Server 2.1) was used in the benchmark runs.

Ingo Molnar's new process ID allocator - and the objections to it - were covered last week. Ingo posted a new version of the patch which addressed some of the complaints, and which was to Linus's liking; it was merged into the 2.5.37 kernel.

---

(Log in to post comments)