Linux Kernel Performance

Linux kernel has been evolving very rapidly and progressing at an astonishing speed. Kernel change rate sustained at average 2,000 patches a month currently. With this kind of fast development in the kernel, we have often seen newer versions of kernel consistently show worse performance on several industry standard workloads. It is inevitable that performance for various kernel components were inadvertently affected at such change rate. To sustain the kernel performance and shortening the cycles of performance regressions, a systematic methodology is developed and launched in practice by Linux kernel performance project hosted on sourceforge.net. In this paper, we will discussion in detail the Linux Kernel Performance Project that was started since July 2005. We will present our benchmark methodology, infrastructure, and large set of benchmark results collected over the course of 2.6 kernel development cycle and present our performance optimization work on Linux kernel. This paper will also examine several large historical performance regressions occurred in the 2.6 kernel development cycle and how Intel and the Linux community worked together to make Linux kernel a world class enterprise operating system.