Hi,
I'm pleased to announce a new project related to Linux kernel tunables.
Any comment you have will be welcome!
Automatic Kernel Tunables Project
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The AKT (Automatic Kernel Tunables) project aims at:
1. providing a standard API to unify the various ways Linux developers
have to access kernel tunables, system information, resource
consumptions: today, installation scripts, supervision scripts and more
generally applications are facing the following issues:
. There are quite multiple ways of accessing the kernel
configuration and tunables: /procfs, /sysfs, sysconf(),
rlimit(), etc...,
. The associated executables are rarely portable, since they
require to get, set and change values that are represented
by objects that may change from distribution to distribution,
or from one release to the other inside the same distribution.
This raises the need for a standard, well defined API to manipulate the
kernel configuration and tunables for software products to relay on.
This API will be built on top of the existing mechanisms: it will "hide"
them instead of replacing them, in order not to break backward
compatibility.
2. making the kernel able to automatically tune the resources as it sees
appropriate. This is a much more complicated feature that will be
considered as a second step for the project
A design about 1st point will be available soon at
http://akt.sourceforge.net/.
Everything related to this project will be dropped at this url, and
further discussions will take place in the dedicated project mailing
lists at SF.
Regards,
Nadia
--
> 2. making the kernel able to automatically tune the resources as it sees
> appropriate. This is a much more complicated feature that will be
> considered as a second step for the project
You might be interested in the work Jacob Moilanen has been doing with
genetic algorithm tuning of I/O and CPU schedulers. Google will
probably turn up some discussion on this. Also, he is scheduled to give
a presentation and paper on this topic at the Ottawa Linux Symposium in
July.