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Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, announced the release of the 2.6.38 Linux kernel, which he says includes "deep changes." It's the second major Linux kernel to come out this year, and it comes with a number of improvements that should have a positive impact on performance, making open source operating systems faster than ever before.
In an email announcing the release, Torvalds said of all the changes -- and there are many -- his "personal favorite remains the VFS name look-up changes." VFS refers to the Virtual File System, which has been overhauled to make multi-threaded workloads more scalable, as well as boost performance of single-threaded workloads.
Another major change is the addition of "transparent huge pages" (THP), now used as the default whenever possible. It's a feature that has Red Hat particularly stoked.
"There are many performance enhancements that went into 2.6.38, transparent huge pages is one of those noticeable features," Tim Burke, vice president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat told InternetNews.com. "To give you a better idea of how important Red Hat considers transparent huge pages, Red Had led the initial upstream implementation in the time frame to include in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. We continue to evolve the types of memory use cases to be fully covered by transparent huge pages."
All in all, it's a rather ambitious update, but even so, Tovalds is "hoping this ends up being a fairly calm release."
Image Credit: IEEE Computer Society @ UWM.edu
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DorkusMalorkus
March 17, 2011 at 11:08am
After using both for quite a while, I'm glad that this update's coming around. After using both Windows 7 and Ubuntu, there's basically no difference in speed between the two that I've noticed. Both are responsive and stable. Could this be the difference that makes me go either way? We'll see.
ShyLinuxGuy
March 17, 2011 at 10:49am
Back when I started using Linux in 2004, it was incredibly faster than Windows could ever be. Back then, I was using a Pentium III system which formerly had a crapped-out XP install. It wasn't as cool as today's distros--it had a pretty boring GNOME desktop (or KDE, believe it or not) with no intentions on looking pretty OOTB. That was Fedora Core 1.
Then, I moved to Ubuntu. It was pretty quick, but very usable and appealing. Since then, Ubuntu was what I used as a Linux distro. It was easier to work with than Fedora in configuration, yet allowed me to learn Linux at my own pace. However, starting with Ubuntu 9.04, I've noticed that Ubuntu was getting much better and a lot more usable, but a little slower at each release. I am not sure if it is the kernel or if it is Ubuntu (minus the kernel) itself. I mean, it's not dragging by its heels (I have an Athlon II @ 3GHz currently), but I've noticed little nuances in copying to/from USB, opening a folder of a mounted partition/hard drive, connecting to wireless network, etc. Since these are mostly kernel-level operations, it might be the case.
Torvalds said so himself a while ago that the kernel was getting bloated...too many features, drivers, etc were being included. I'm glad that this is being noticed and being acted on.
bpstone
March 17, 2011 at 3:40pm
Linux Ubuntu is bloated with too much software. They really need to go through and clean it out.
deadsenator
March 20, 2011 at 6:57pm
It's bloated because they want *everyone* to be able to load it on *anything* and have what they want. Buld your own tight kernel with the source code and trim it up if you want. You can do that. This bloat has contributed to its success.
bpstone
March 21, 2011 at 1:23am
I am switching to Arch Linux then customizing my interface to my liking without bloating it with things I don't use. Another thing I am interested in is making my interface maintenance free and user friendly (without the bloat) as possible after my final build. Windows games and programs can be run on Linux. It is capable of so much. I'm so sick of Windows and their constant maintenance. I can catch everything up, then something go haywire the next day. (X_>X)
The next OGL should finally outdo DX11 where it has lacked a little behind. Opengl is a superior platform in my opinion and what has held it a little behind DX11 here lately is keeping its famous backward compatibility. Developers are getting tired of the limitation of APIs. PCs are often ten times more powerful than a console, but the API limitation as well as porting console games over to PC is why games don't look all too different. If you get rid of the API limitation factor, you'd see games that would really blow your mind. There is, of course, a downside for doing that. You'd risk unstable programs or games on some hardware. In the PC world there are thousands of pieces of hardware and thousands of different combinations. OGL needs better driver certification support from hardware vendors too.
You can hit up YouTube and see some pretty bad tail Linux systems.
PCLinuxguy
August 26, 2011 at 1:52pm
Debian wouldn't be too bad I'd think in regards of "bloat' compared to ubuntu ootb. Like all systems I run, I keep and install what I want/need and purge the rest to keep things trim and quick. on youtube i did see a nice Arch build with the E17 setup and it was very nice.
paladaxar
March 17, 2011 at 9:50am
Sweet! Thanks for the update! Since I primarily use this site fore my pc news updates, it's always good to see Linux getting some love...since that's the OS I use on a daily basis :)
