LWN on Linux Kernel: Performance, Timers, and 2022 Image-Based Linux Summit
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Two performance-oriented patches: epoll and NUMA balancing [LWN.net]
The search for better performance from the kernel never ends. Recently there has been a stream of smaller patches that promise incremental performance gains, at least for some types of applications. Read on for an overview of two of those patches, which make changes to the epoll system calls and to NUMA balancing. This work shows where developers are looking for performance improvements — and that not everybody measures performance the same way.
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Better CPU selection for timer expiration [LWN.net]
On the surface, the kernel's internal timer mechanism would not appear to have changed much in a long time; the core API looks quite similar to the one present in the 1.0 release. Underneath the API, naturally, quite a bit of complexity has been added over the years. The implementation of this API looks to become even more complex — but faster — if and when this patch set from Anna-Maria Behnsen finds its way into the mainline.
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A report from the 2022 Image-Based Linux Summit [LWN.net]
The first Image-Based Linux Summit was held in Berlin on October 5 and 6, 2022. The main goal of this summit was to agree on common concepts and tooling for how to build, deploy, and run modern, secure, image-based Linux distributions — a project that the organizers, Christian Brauner, Luca Boccassi, and Lennart Poettering, have been working on for some time. The result was a more refined vision of how Linux systems can be built and deployed securely.
One of the motivations for the summit was the simple fact that much of the wider ecosystem has been thinking about the same set of problems. For example, our employer, Microsoft, has made use of a lot of the concepts covered by the summit in the recently announced ARM64-based Azure offload SoC, which is running a custom, security-hardened Linux distribution. While we were thinking, tinkering, and writing about new ways to improve the current state of the art, it became obvious to us that many vendors are working, more or less, in the same space, doing similar work with varying degrees of overlap. However, little to no collaboration was happening. The summit was meant to identify and agree on common concepts and come up with a set of initial specifications. Some of them already have reference implementations.
So we invited technical representatives from the engineering groups of various vendors and distributions that have been known to work on related topics. The summit was intentionally kept small, as it was meant to be a series of conversations and brainstorming sessions, with no fixed agenda or presentations — a BoF-style event. The 30 participants met in the Microsoft office in Berlin and discussed a range of topics from a list that the authors and participants had put together in advance. The topics covered were focused around the idea of shipping Linux via images and with enhanced security features.