The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The ~200 Line Linux Kernel Patch That Does Wonders

In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving the responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite small -- just over 200 lines of code -- but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15455

[ripps818]

Will this increase performance on my old AMD Athlon XP machine, or does it only really help those with multicore cpu's?

[crispy]

So now it will actually be practiical to multitask in linux?

[ad_267]

It doesn't seem like this would make much difference to general users who aren't running big jobs in another tty though, it's a pretty specific use case. Most of the big jobs I run are on another machine through SSH. Still pretty awesome though.

[fish_sticks]

Will there be a significant difference in fps with the patch?

[ad_267]

Will there be a significant difference in fps with the patch?

Yes if you're compiling the Linux kernel at the same time.

[korpenkraxar]

It doesn't seem like this would make much difference to general users who aren't running big jobs in another tty though, it's a pretty specific use case. Most of the big jobs I run are on another machine through SSH. Still pretty awesome though.

Hang on. So no performance boost for most of us?

[Chousuke]

Hang on. So no performance boost for most of us?

It's not so much a performance boost than it is better balancing of resources. Your computer is not any faster, but it will distribute CPU power more evenly so that everything will *feel* faster.

If you ever run any CPU- and/or IO-intensive program in the background (say, a system upgrade, or a locatedb cron job), this patch should be helpful.

[korpenkraxar]

If you ever run any CPU- and/or IO-intensive program in the background (say, a system upgrade, or a locatedb cron job), this patch should be helpful.

Yeah, this is what I meant. Responsiveness is a better term than performance I guess. No more tears when updatedb kicks in?

[dagger]

Just tested this patch and from what I can see it doesn't make anything faster. It makes everything *MUCH* smoother by reducing resources to processes which use a lot of CPU - (like make -j64 on linux kernel). Compilation takes a bit longer, but system is fully usable during that time.

This is by far one of the best patches I've tested so far! Outstanding work. Thanks for bringing that up!