1. Peter Wong - 2.4.17 vs 2.5.26 both patched and run under a very heavy db load. Showed a performance benefit which is promising. Cliff White asked what did you change in execv? Badari Pulavarty made the changes. Basically to support the db. OSDL would like to talk about what was changed because they might want them. He will contact Badari. 2. Jenny - we did 2.4.18 vs 2.5.29 and did not see much difference performance wise except the memory pages behavior is different. tried on 2.5.31 got file.c fcntl() not available errors. Cliff said the OSDL now has automated stp testing of the latest 2.5 kernels. Gerrit asked if they have tried running with oprofile which they havent but think they should start. Some IBM 8-ways have a problem with NMI's running oprofile. But the OSDL 8-ways are NEC so they might not have the same NMI problems with oprofile. It might be nice to verify if that is true or not. They would really like some help tuning the db. so feel free to send them email if you would like to help. 3. Paul Larson - Doing nightly ltp tests of the most recent 2.5 bitkeeper kernels. Every morning get an email with the results of what changed and what broke. Comes in very handy because they are usually related but not always also very useful to the developers whose code changes are still fresh in their mind when the results come in. We are also doing code coverage analysis thanks to the kernel gcov patches available on the lse site. to see the code coverage results go to http://ltp.sf.net or http://ltp.org. However, there appears to be a problem with the gcov tools regarding block or line counts. Paul will contact Janis Johnson to get help from the gcc community. 4. Mala Anand - skb init patch sent out last week and ben lahaise wanted more performance results with all the cycles spent in the whole area. He is happy with the new data provided and gave her more suggestions for things to look at. Still needs to get performance results from those suggestions. Dave Hanson provided read profile results showing no benefit from the skb patch. However, read profile only works off sampling and Mala is not concerned with those results due to that. Next step is to continue working on the suggestions Ben gave her and getting out the performance results. Martin said she is changing the nature of the code with her measurements so it is not a valid way to prove the patch has a benefit. He agreed read profile is not a good profiler for this type of patch but dave also showed a reduction in throughput of the benchmark with the patch applied (regardless of read profile). Rick recommended she cc the netdev alias to get feedback from more people. 5. Matt Dobson - Submitted against 2.5.31 again yesterday. There are two pieces he is trying to get in. The first one is the topology which will be in driverfs now. second part is a memory binding api to allow programs to bind their memory to particular nodes or memory block. (request allocation of memory from a particular area == bind). He has been submitting many times and will submit again with the driverfs changes. Will not use the system call or prctrl solution anymore and will change it to use driverfs instead. Hopefully more people will like this solution better. Will resubmit today. Matt requested patches from other architectures be sent to him at colpatch@us.ibm.com and he will include them.