Put Linux to the test

Looks like Torvalds is really working to push Linux even further as Microsoft is beginning to respond better to customer concerns of security and price. Don’t get me wrong, I have major gripes with both OS’. Even to this day, I feel that OS X is still the easiest move away from Windows. But Linux is moving forward faster than ever before. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this for sure.

Currently, performance figures are only available for a few of the latest production kernels. Torvalds said it would be useful to continually test the performance of the development kernel, so that inefficient code can be spotted more easily.

“Doing just release kernels means that there will be a two-month lag between telling developers that something (messed) up performance,” Torvalds wrote in a posting to the Linux kernel mailing list. “Doing it every day (or at least a couple of times a week) will be much more interesting.”

The issue was raised when Intel employee Kenneth Chen announced some performance figures for various versions of the 2.6 kernel. The tests found that versions 2.6.11, 2.6.9, 2.6.8 and 2.6.2 of the kernel performed 13, 6, 23 and 1 percent slower respectively than the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 baseline–which runs on version 2.4 of the kernel, with some added features from version 2.6. [Read the rest]