Kernel Space: Linux Runs Into a Scalability Problem

“Part of the fun of working with truly large machines is that
one gets to discover new scalability surprises before anybody else.
So the SGI folks often have more fun than many of the rest of us.
Their latest discovery has to do with the number of kernel threads
which, on a 4096-processor system, leads to some interesting kernel
behavior.

“To begin, they found out that they could not even boot a kernel
with the default configuration. Linux systems normally have a limit
of 32768 active processes at any given time…”

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