Linux Plumbers Conf 2009

The scheduler tick must die. The kernel has long had a “tickless” or “nohz” mechanism to shut down the timer tick when not needed, but this mechanism only works when idle, not when running. If every function currently polling from the timer tick could instead make use of an appropriate event, or just wait to get updated until the next time the kernel has work to do, the kernel could become entirely event-driven. An event-driven kernel would improve throughput by decreasing interruptions, improve latency by removing large non-preemptible regions, improve consistency by eliminating the primary source of jitter, and improve power savings by getting done and back to sleep sooner.

The Out of Memory (OOM) killer has consistently been a hotly debated topic in Linux. Why does it kill? What is being done to improve it? What do users really need it to do?

A discussion on how to manage KVM guests using CIM.

Running KVM in KVM, Xen in KVM, Hyper-V in KVM, ...