[CS-FSLUG] The Linux desktop is about to get a LOT faster

[Davo Smith]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Cia Watson <ciamarie at my180.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:18:05 -0500
> "Fred A. Miller" <fmiller at lightlink.com> wrote:
>
>> On 11/18/2010 03:21 AM, Cia Watson wrote:
>> > Awesome... I'll be on the lookout. The thing is I'd really want it
>> > on my old laptop with only 256mb of ram, running Fedora 12 which
>> > just went EOL last week. So I may have to see if I can shoe-horn
>> > F13 on there, when I tried before I think it would just go into
>> > some reboot cycle and never get me to a desktop. Or possibly F14...
>>
>> 'Might not be able to put it on there.....getting tough to use
>> anything current on some old limited hardware.
>
> Thanks Fred, I suspect you're right, and I'm just going to let F12 stay
> put on there. I do have it dual-booting with Linux Mint 9 LXDE which
> may end up with an updated kernel with that patch at some point soon. I
> don't use the Mint very often because it does strange things to the
> system clock so I have to enter the date & time for the bios just to
> get it to boot after running Mint.  Same thing when I tried
> #!Crunchbang on there.
>
> And my primary computer is my desktop pc, so I'm sure that will see the
> new kernel goodness sometime soon!

Sadly, reading up on it in a bit more detail, it basically boils down to this:

If you are running a large number of very intensive processes that are
eating up most of your CPU time (e.g. a highly optimised build process
for the Linux kernel), then they all get scheduled as a single block,
meaning the web browser / video player you are also using gets 50% of
the scheduling time, rather than 2% (with the other 49
kernel-compiling processes getting the other 98% shared between them).

This is a big win for kernel developers, but probably irrelevant to
everyone else.

Davo