Linux Plumbers Conf 2013

One Line Summary

Abstract

Mutexes and read-write semaphores are two fundamental synchronization mechanisms used in the Linux kernel. While it’s always good to avoid the need for locking, optimizing them is an obvious way of optimizing kernel performance. To this end, during the course of this year, both have gotten a fair amount of attention, revisiting the algorithmic ideas behind them and uncovering new issues and fixes. This work has led to significant performance benefits on large multi-core systems, spanning a variety of workloads.

The idea of this session is to present an overview of these efforts, compare to where the kernel was just last year and discuss possible opportunities for further optimizations.

Tags

scaling, performance, locking, syncronization, mutual exclusion, benchmarking

Speaker

• Davidlohr Bueso

  Hewlett-Packard
  • Blog: http://blog.stgolabs.net/
  • Twitter: davidlohr

  Biography

  Davidlohr Bueso works for Hewlett-Packard as a software engineer, focusing on the Linux kernel. His work, closely tied to the Linux community, focuses on optimizing and boosting the kernel’s performance for large x86 NUMA based HP servers.