Messages in this thread | | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | Subject | SMP update: 2.1.30 | Date | 27 Mar 1997 05:19:29 GMT |
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[ this may show up multiple times, I'm a klutz ]
I released 2.1.30 a few hours ago, after a longish delay. The reason for the delay is the new SMP code in 2.1.30 - this is the first kernel that supports (a limited form of) concurrent kernel CPU usage. Rather than using just one large lock for the whole kernel, 2.1.30 starts to split the locks into smaller sections. I've been working on getting that working and stable the last ten days...
Note that the 2.1.30 kernel doesn't actually have very many locks: the current locks are mainly concerned with interrupt handling and process scheduling, as those two areas are the most fundamental and any future locking changes rely on these being stable. As such you shouldn't expect any huge difference in behaviour - Linux still isn't likely to scale linearly on anything that spends appeciable amounts of CPU-time in kernel mode.
However, the change is quite fundamental, and I'd ask anybody who is running Linux/SMP to try out the new kernel if you're at all willing to test bleeding-edge stuff. I haven't yet much looked into the impact of the new code on uni-processor machines, but I'd certainly appreciate comments and potential patches for UP-related issues too...
Final comment: I've been very much in hack mode for the last week, concentrating on making sure the SMP code is basically sane. As usual, that means that my email queue hasn't gotten all that much attention, and if you have a patch that didn't find its way into 2.1.30 it is probably best to re-send.. Sorry.
The 2.1.30 SMP change fixes the SMP lockup problem (this is the same problem that had an interim fix in 2.1.29). If you have problems with your SMP setup tending to silently just lock up under heavy load, this kernel is definitely worth testing.
Finally - 2.1.30 is likely to break on non-x86 platforms. I hope to get that fixed soon (our machines from Finland still haven't arrived, so I can't do alpha development right now, but that should be rectified soon).
Comments?
Linus
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