Resource Scalability Effort


Current Status


Static Arrays in the Linux 2.4.16 Kernel

Most static limits have been removed from the Linux kernel, but this effort is intended to find all remaining static limits in the kernel and remove them. This generally involves changing any static arrays of resources to dynamically allocated data structures. Of course there are other ways in which static limits may be imposed, but our initial effort specifically addresses static arrays of resources.

To this end, a table of static arrays has been created. This table was generated from a Linux 2.4.16 SMP kernel compiled with the -g option, so the scope of the table is limited to the configuration of this kernel.

Many of the static arrays in the kernel are due to static character string declarations, or other specific data types which have no impact on scalability. The number of symbols have been reduced by a factor of 10 by filtering out symbol names that match the following regular expressions:

/^__kstrtab_.*/
/^__setup_str_.*/
/^__vendorstr_.*/
/^__devicestr_.*/
/^__devices_.*/
The first step is to investigate the remaining table entries in order to eliminate the arrays that do not affect resource scalability, and to identify those that do. If you are interested in assisting in this effort, please send e-mail to Russ Weight.

The "notes" column of the table should provide a very brief description of each array. If there are any resource limits associated with the array, then these limits should be also be described in the notes column.

Static array tables for previous kernel versions may be accessed below:


Disk IO statistics for all disks


This work is intended to extend the gathering of disk statistics to include major numbers greater than 15.  Patches and more discussions are moved to here.
 


IPC resources

We documented the implementation of IPC mechanism in linux 2.4.5 kernel while we were investigating possible resource limits in IPC.  Our document is included in Tigran Aivazian's Linux Kernel Internals as a single chapter (5).

The resource limits related to IPC in the current implementation can be found here.  Most of them could be dynamically tune up now.


Patches

Last updated: 11/09/01 Any problems, additions, etc , please send email to the maintainer of this website.
SourceForge Logo