[ Thanks to Jeremy for this link. ]
Kerneltrap has spoken with Linux kernel hacker, Andrew
Morton. His contributions cover a wide range of kernel components,
including ext3 on 2.4 and the low-latency patch. Currently he works
for moxi.com:“JA: Do you have plans to get your
low-latency patch into the 2.5 kernel?Andrew Morton: Not in its present form. First
I’d like to see a general consensus that Linux should become a
low-latency OS. With that, we can then merge the preempt patch and
start work on carefully and cleanly addressing the various
long-held locks. Simply dropping locks and then cleaning up the
mess is not a very satisfactory solution – better would be to
change the local locking design, or to speed the locked code up by
a factor of one hundred. The latter usually is not possible.I do not plan on spending much time on 2.5 for a while. I’d
rather invest effort in things which are more immediately needed by
people. There are still many correctness, performance and
quality-of-implementation issues to be addressed in 2.4.x. The
2.4.x core has only stabilized very recently and there remains
quite a bit of tuning and mop-up work.”