hi andrew, hi everyone !
as per your request, i fearlessly built and booted 2.5.41 with
preemption enabled.
although it was my first take at the dev kernel, it went very smoothly
:-D
anyway, it seems to perform worse than 2.4.20-pre1-lowlatency. it feels
very snappy on startup, but under load it is a lot less responsive to
user interaction.
i have run benno senoner's latencytest on both kernels. you can see the
results at
http://spunk.dnsalias.org/latencytest .
for me, the biggest problem seems to be soft-raid. i have my /var
partition striped over 2 scsi disks, and accessing them causes huge
latency peaks.
is there any chance to get this under control ?
i don't have a spare disk around, so i can't easily compare to non-raid,
but i'm quite sure it's the source of the problem, because people with
similar hardware are doing fine.
other than that, there were a few peaks under /proc stress, but they are
not easily reproducible.
i have not yet tested your mm-patches due to a compile failure (log is
attached below). i used
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/2.5/2.5.41/2.5.41-mm3/2.5.41-mm3.gz.
if there's any patches to try or more benchmarks to run, let me know.
best,
j?rn
***
Hardware: Dual-P3 @ 600Mhz, 512MB PC100 SDRAM, ASUS P2B-DS
one 4G IBM DCAS SCSI disk (/), 2 9G COMPAQ SCSI disks (/var, soft-RAID
0),
SCSI CDROM and CDR, no IDE devices.
Soundcards: SB Live (used during the tests) and Ensoniq 1371 (idle)
The audio file that was played back during the tests came over NFS.
***
make -f init/Makefile
Generating include/linux/compile.h (updated)
gcc -Wp,-MD,init/.version.o.d -D__KERNEL__ -Iinclude -Wall
-Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common
-pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=i686 -Iarch/i386/mach-generic
-fomit-frame-pointer -nostdinc -iwithprefix include
-DKBUILD_BASENAME=version -c -o init/version.o init/version.c
ld -m elf_i386 -r -o init/built-in.o init/main.o init/version.o
init/do_mounts.o
ld -m elf_i386 -e stext -T arch/i386/vmlinux.lds.s
arch/i386/kernel/head.o arch/i386/kernel/init_task.o init/built-in.o
--start-group arch/i386/kernel/built-in.o arch/i386/mm/built-in.o
arch/i386/mach-generic/built-in.o kernel/built-in.o mm/built-in.o
fs/built-in.o ipc/built-in.o security/built-in.o lib/lib.a
arch/i386/lib/lib.a drivers/built-in.o sound/built-in.o
arch/i386/pci/built-in.o net/built-in.o --end-group -o .tmp_vmlinux1
fs/built-in.o: In function `isofs_put_super':
fs/built-in.o(.text+0x390e5): undefined reference to `unload_nls'
fs/built-in.o: In function `isofs_fill_super':
fs/built-in.o(.text+0x39f0b): undefined reference to `load_nls'
fs/built-in.o(.text+0x39f25): undefined reference to `load_nls_default'
fs/built-in.o(.text+0x3a0c6): undefined reference to `unload_nls'
fs/built-in.o: In function `wcsntombs_be':
fs/built-in.o(.text+0x3c60b): undefined reference to `utf8_wctomb'
make: *** [.tmp_vmlinux1] Error 1
--
J?rn Nettingsmeier
Kurf?rstenstr 49, 45138 Essen, Germany
http://spunk.dnsalias.org (my server)
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/ (Linux Audio Developers)