AernaLingus [any]

Original Declassified article

Link to the report

Original Phoronix article which has all the individual benchmarks—weird that they didn’t link to it

There’s a variable that contains the number of cores (called cpus) which is hardcoded to max out at 8, but it doesn’t mean that cores aren’t utilized beyond 8 cores–it just means that the scheduling scaling factor will not change in either the linear or logarithmic case once you go above that number:

/*
 * Increase the granularity value when there are more CPUs,
 * because with more CPUs the 'effective latency' as visible
 * to users decreases. But the relationship is not linear,
 * so pick a second-best guess by going with the log2 of the
 * number of CPUs.
 *
 * This idea comes from the SD scheduler of Con Kolivas:
 */
static unsigned int get_update_sysctl_factor(void)
{
	unsigned int cpus = min_t(unsigned int, num_online_cpus(), 8);
	unsigned int factor;

	switch (sysctl_sched_tunable_scaling) {
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_NONE:
		factor = 1;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LINEAR:
		factor = cpus;
		break;
	case SCHED_TUNABLESCALING_LOG:
	default:
		factor = 1 + ilog2(cpus);
		break;
	}

	return factor;
}

The core claim is this:

It’s problematic that the kernel was hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores (scaling factor of 4). It can’t be good to reschedule hundreds of tasks every few milliseconds, maybe on a different core, maybe on a different die. It can’t be good for performance and cache locality.

On this point, I have no idea (hope someone more knowledgeable will weigh in). But I’d say the headline is misleading at best.

Real babies in incubators

Imaginary babies in incubators