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Sep. 18, 2009

In the recent past, and for the most part, some of the improvements to the Linux kernel have been mostly for server users. But with the release of the new 2.6.31 kernel, many of the new features were designed for Linux desktop users.

Below is a list of some of the five most important new features.

1) Improved desktop speed -- Due to some recent changes in the kernel, when Linux systems started running out of memory, the kernel was set up so that PROT_EXEC pages, memory pages that usually belong to currently running foreground programs were being mishandled. Instead of being kept in the memory cache, they were being written to disk until they were needed.

As anyone who's ever done system optimization knows, the last place you want frequently accessed or active desktop programs is on disk. In a worst case scenario, your performance can slow down so much that it makes the system almost useless.

Now however, Linux's improved memory management feature makes sure that currently running programs stay on top of the list of active memory pages. Technical benchmarks show that netbook users and other people who run Linux on limited memory systems can expect to see a desktop that's up to 50 percent faster than it's been in the recent past.

2) USB 3 Support -- We've been connecting our devices to our PCs with USB ports instead of serial or parallel ports for some time now, and that's been good. USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of 480 Mbps, which is fast — but these days, when you might want to move gigabytes of movies from one device to another, it's not fast enough.

That's why the USB vendors have been working on USB 3.0, which is almost 10 times faster than USB 2. USB 3 can run at an effective throughput rate of 350 MBps. USB 2.0 maxes out at about 32 MBps. That's faster than the SATA hard drive you are almost certainly using in your PC.

USB 3.0 devices, which will go by the trade name of SuperSpeed USB, will start appearing by this coming December. What's especially interesting about Linux supporting these new devices is that it is ahead of Windows and Mac OS X in supporting these super-speed hard drives, USB-flash drives and the like.

Neither Windows 7 nor Snow Leopard currently supports USB 3.

3) Improved graphics support -- There are a lot of minor graphic improvements in this release, but the most significant are better support for the Intel i915 and ATI Radeon graphics family. These changes make graphic drivers for both popular set of graphics devices work better in Linux.

4) File system performance improvements -- Ext3 and its successor, Ext4, are the most popular Linux desktop file systems — but neither are that fast. Recently, Linus Torvalds noted that both Ext3 and Ext4 do "ACL (Access Control List,) checks on any files not owned by the caller, and it does this for every single pathname component that it looks up." That is a big performance hit.

Torvalds continued, "That obviously can be pretty expensive if the file-system isn't careful about it, especially with locking. That's doubly sad, since the common case tends to be that there are no ACL's associated with the files in question." So, Torvalds has changed it so that the default behavior is to load the ACLs without any locking.

The net result is that file system reads are now about 3 percent faster. That may not sound like much, but it's every file read such as when you start up a program. People who use the Oracle originated Btrfs file system will see even better performance gains with up to 15 percent improvements.

5) Better network support -- Like in graphics, the real news is in new support for specific hardware. The change that will matter to most people is that Linux now includes built-in support for Intel's new Wi-Fi 802.11 3200 hardware. 3200 devices and network cards will be available next year.

While this version doesn't support the just-approved, high-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, by the time the new network equipment is shipping, 802.11n support will be added.

So these are some really good improvements for all Linux desktop users. Whether you want to get the most from a new PC next year with USB 3 and Intel 3200 networking, or from an older PC or netbook with minimal memory, Linux will be the desktop operating system of choice for many.

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Source: CWT.

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