Linux 3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39

"On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Andi Kleen <> wrote:
> Linus Torvalds writes:
>and the conversion from spinlocks to mutexes for the anon_vma locking ended up causing a scalability issue that required fixing.
>
> FWIW it's still ~16% slower. Does that count as fixed?

"Well, so far I haven't really seen any suggestions on how to improve it much further.

"3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39 due to the other changes made (ie the read-ahead), so yes, the regression itself is fixed.

"But performance on that particular benchmark with that particular machine is clearly not optimal, in that there are known setups that would be faster still.

"Of course, the reason for the mutex conversion was _other_ loads, where the spinlocks had bad behavior. So it's a balancing act. And I suspect we've reached a reasonable point in that balancing, yes.

Linus

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Linux 3.0 -rc4(Jun 21, 2011)
• Linux 3.0 -rc3 Released(Jun 14, 2011)
• Linux 3.0 -rc2(Jun 06, 2011)
• Linux 3.0 -rc1(May 30, 2011)
• Why it's time for Linux 3.0(May 26, 2011)