Though there prolly aren't that many Linux users on the forum, and those that are will already be well informed, I figured to post this article as it highlights a few major updates:
Linux kernel speeds up on the desktop
X desktop speed doubled
By Nick Farrell
Monday, 7 September 2009, 10:05
LINUX HACKERS working on the next version of the Linux kernel claim that some new improvements will speed up the OS on the desktop.
While many Linux geeks were looking forward to USB 3.0 support and new Firewire drivers, kernel developers have also been working on improvements to desktop interactivity, particularly when the OS is under memory pressure.
Currently desktop software slows down when its path jumps to a part of the code that is not cached in memory and needs to be paged-in from disk. That can be caused by poor memory management that doesn't scale all that well in the desktop environment.
In Linux kernel version 2.6.31, developers have added some heuristics to make it much harder for 'mapped executable pages' to get moved out of the list of active pages.
Benchmarks on memory-constrained desktops show clock time and major page-faults reduced by 50 per cent, and memory reads from disk are reduced by about two-thirds.
According to Techworld, this means that X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. According to memory flushing benchmarks the number of major page-faults dropped from 50 to 3 during 10 per cent cache hot reads.
This coupled with kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards will make the Linux 2.6.31 kernel a significant jump on the desktop. µ
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/317416/kernel_2_6_31_speed_up_linux_desktopI personally dual boot with Linux on my work laptop and use it predominantly for troubleshooting networking issues, but i'd really like to see Linux take off properly on the desktop as it really does have a polished look (Ubuntu 9.10) and uses less resources than it's proprietary other.
