SMP Scalability Comparisons of Linux Kernels 2.2.14 and 2.3.99

The Linux 2.4 kernel should provide significantly better SMP scalability than is available in the 2.2 series. While the development of the 2.4 kernel is still continuing, performance studies on the 2.3.99 kernels can be used as an indicator of what the performance of the 2.4 kernel will be like. In this paper, we compare performance and SMP scalability of Linux 2.2.14 and Linux 2.3.99 on the Intel¨ 32-bit platform using four benchmarks. Three of these are targeted to specific system components; the fourth is SPECweb99ª. SMP scaling for these benchmarks is shown to be significantly better with 2.3.99 than it is with 2.2.14. This should translate into significantly better SMP scaling (and hence additional raw performance on SMP systems) for applications running under Linux 2.4.