SMP & audio: One area that hasn't been changed for moving towards fine-grained kernel locking was NetBSD's audio subsystem. As audio recording and playback is mostly done via interrupts, and as latency in those is critical, the audio subsystem was moved to the new interrupt handling system. The work can be found on the ad-audiomp branch, more information is available in Andrew's posting about the MP safe audio framework and drivers.

Benchmarking: Changing a system from inside out is a huge technical task. On the way, performance measurements and tuning are needed to make sure that the previous performance is still achieved while getting better performance in the desired development area. As a result, benchmarks results from Sun's libmicro benchmark suite were posted, which allow comparison not only against Linux and FreeBSD, but also between NetBSD-current and NetBSD 4.0, in order to identify if any bad effects were added. All performance tests were made on a machine with 8 CPUs, and the areas tested cover "small" (micro) areas like various system calls. Of course this doesn't lead to a 1:1 statement on how the systems will perform in a real-life scenario like e.g. in a database performance test, but it still help identifying problems and gives better hints where tuning can be done.

Another benchmark that was also made in that regard comes from Gregory McGarry, who has published performance measurements previously. This time, Gregory has run the lmbench 3.0 benchmark on recent NetBSD and FreeBSD systems as well as a number of previous NetBSD releases - useful for identifying performance degradation, too!

One other benchmark on dispatch latency run was made by Andrew Doran: on a machine that was (CPU-wise) loaded by some compile jobs, he started a two threads on a CPU that wasn't distracted by device interrupts, and measured how fast the scheduler reacted when one thread woke up the other one. The resulting graph shows that the scheduler handles the majority of requests in less than 10us - good enough for some realtime applications?

Kernel modules are another area that's under heavy change right now, and after recent changes to load modules from the bootloader and the kernel, the kernel build process was now changed so that pre-built kernel modules can be linked into a new kernel binary, resulting in a non-modular kernel. Eventually, this could mean that src/sys is built into separate modules, and that the (many) existing kernels that are present for each individual platform -- GENERIC, INSTALL is already gone, ALL, etc. etc. -- can be simply linked from pre-compiled modules, without recompiling things over again for each kernel. Of course the overal goal here is to speed up the system (and kernel!) build time, while maintaining maximum flexibility between modules and non-modular kernels.

With the progress in kernel modules, it is a question of time when the new kernel module handling supercedes the existing loadable kernel modules to such an extent that the latter will be completely removed from the system -- at least the latter was alredy proposed, but I'd prefer to see some documentation of the new system first. We'll see what comes first! (Documentation writers are always welcome! :-)

[Tags: benchmark, kernel, smp]