Linux 5.12-rc5 Released - It's Bigger Than Average

[jacob]

That's the spirit!
I mean seriously, why would anyone on a desktop system use anything other than full-preemption? (»uname -a« should show "PREEMPT")

That being said, first make sure that your distro of choice really does allow you to switch the preemption model without introducing any significant overhead by making sure the following option in your kernel config is actually enabled:

zcat /proc/config.gz | grep HAVE_STATIC_CALL_INLINE

Else start buggering them already!

For anyone on openSUSE Tumbleweed (like me): Y'all are already covered!

Good on openSUSE. I'm on Fedora (5.11 atm) and that option is enabled too. But IIRC there will have to be another option enabled, PREEMPT_DYNAMIC or something like that. Hopefully fedora will have it - the days of me compiling the kernel myself are long gone, nowadays I stick to the distro's packages.

BTW: full preemption is not a silver bullet. If your main use case is software development/compilation then voluntary preemption is better (higher IO throughput), also if you want to do word-processing/ebook reading etc. on a long flight, it's better to disable it as it will give you slightly better battery autonomy.

[quaz0r]

I'm really looking forward to this landing in my distro.

now thats definitely what she said

[perpetually high]

That's the spirit!
I mean seriously, why would anyone on a desktop system use anything other than full-preemption? (»uname -a« should show "PREEMPT")

That being said, first make sure that your distro of choice really does allow you to switch the preemption model without introducing any significant overhead by making sure the following option in your kernel config is actually enabled:

zcat /proc/config.gz | grep HAVE_STATIC_CALL_INLINE

Else start buggering them already!

For anyone on openSUSE Tumbleweed (like me): Y'all are already covered!

Agreed. You always share good tidbits, thank you.

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 but build my own custom kernel so I have the option enabled.

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 5.11.10-051110+custom-generic #051110+202103261230 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 27 12:31:20 PDT 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ zcat /proc/config.gz | grep HAVE_STATIC_CALL_INLINE
CONFIG_HAVE_STATIC_CALL_INLINE=y