friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

5.9 Tickless Kernels Available now:

eskimo.com/.../linux-5.9-tickl…
eskimo.com/.../linux-5.9-tickl…

Both of these kernels are tickless idle. Which means when a clock tick happens, the it is serviced and processes scheduled only if there is work pending. This saves a lot of unnecessary CPU wake-ups and is especially valuable on laptops where it will save battery or on virtual machines where you have many virtual machines on one physical host. In such a situation just servicing clock interrupts can eat more CPU than running client services.

These Linux kernels are provided with no warantee. Use them only if you agree to accept all risk for any damage to your machine or it's contents.

The are several differences between these kernels and those provided by Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, etc.

First, these are all upstream kernels, they have no vendor patches and only occasional minor patches from me.

Second, they are tickless kernels. CONFIG_NO_HZ is set, CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL is not set. On the client kernel, CONFIG_HZ_1000=y, on the server kernel, CONFIG_HZ_100=y.

The server kernel is non-premptive, the client kernel is fully preemptive. This provides maximum processing ability on the server, minimal latency on client machines.

There are three '.deb' packages provided. Download all three and install with dpkg -i *.deb.

These will work on Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Zorin, JeLinux, MxLinux, and other Debian based distributions.

in reply to Nanook

I use on four physical hosts, one workstation which is running the "client" version, it is an i7-9700k machine with 1G WD Blue SSD and Intel graphics, and three physical hosts, two i7-6700k with 64G RAM and one i7-6850k machine with 128G of RAM, all have KVM-QEMU virtual hosts and two of the three are also NFSv4 servers to each other, a variety of virtual hosts, NFSv3 servers to some older machines running Redhat 6.2 that are UltraSparc based, and one NFSv2 SunOS 4.1.4 machine. The virtual hosts are web servers, shell servers, mail servers, and various application servers. So it's a fairly well rounded load. Going from a tickfull to tickless kernel approximately halved the loads on the physical hosts, going from version 5.7 to 5.8 reduced the webserver response time on a WordPress site from about 800ms to 285ms for full page load, that was a HUGE improvement, but going from 5.8 to 5.9 shaved only about 10ms off of load times, a modest improvement. There was quite a lot of work in scheduler and NFS both on 5.8 so it was more of a major win for us, 5.9 did rework Intel graphics so some help for my workstation not a lot for servers. This friendica node, friendica.eskimo.com/ is running on a 56G virtual machine which is running under the i7-6700k machine. All of the machines here presently running this kernel are Ubuntu 20.04 but I have the 5.8 kernels running under Mint, Debian, MxLinux, Zorin, and a few others, and they will be upgraded by this weekend.
This entry was edited (4 years ago)