Bugzilla – Bug 113713
Kernel is not optimal for desktop systems
Last modified: 2005-08-29 12:21:50 UTC
The kernel is still being provided in a suboptimal form for desktops. The preemptible option is not enabled, for example, and aside from -default and -smp, there is no -multimedia provision (for low latency kernels). Any possibility of getting a more responsive kernel in the 10.0 release?
How big was your measured performance improvement compared to our -default kernel, which already contains many latency improvement over mainline? Please provide some hard numbers using for instance lmbench or iobench
The preempt kernel reduces the throughput performance significantly although it improves the realtime response. It's a big trade-off. Thus, unless we ship serpate kernels, preempt can't be turned on --- it means, we would need to double the number of kernels. That's too much for a small benifit for "desktops". For "normal desktop usage", I'd recommend rather to include Con's scheduler patch than preempt.
Some applications and kernel driver get in trouble with preemptive.
Yes. We will not turn on CONFIG_PREEMPT. However, if you have specific numbers that show our kernel having latencies that prevent adequate multimedia playback, we're of course interested!