Interview With Con Kolivas

Jeremy Andrews writes: “Con Kolivas, a practicing doctor in Australia, has written a benchmarking tool called ConTest which has proven to be tremendously useful to kernel developers, having been designed to compare the performance of different versions of the Linux kernel. He was kind enough to speak with us, explaining how he got started on this project, what makes his benchmark unique, and how to interpret the resulting output. Comparing the 2.5 development kernel to the 2.4 stable kernel, Con says, “a good 2.5 kernel (and that’s not all of them) feels faster than 2.4 in most ways and this bodes well for 2.6.” The interesting results from his frequent benchmarks back up this statement.

Con also describes his high performance patchset for the 2.4 stable kernel, currently at version 2.4.19-ck9. This patchset adds a number of performance boosting patches ideal for a desktop environment, such as the O(1) scheduler, kernel preemption, low latency and compressed caching. Read the full interview at KernelTrap…”