These are areas that Gelato@UNSW is currently looking into.
Old Work
LargeBlockDevices is now essentially complete. We're maintaining a Mailing list for discussion of issues and experiences on Large File Systems; and trying to keep a patch against 2.4 going, but that's about all.
Ongoing Work
MicroStateAccounting is a patch to allow tracking of internal states as a task executes, and to provide better precision timing than the standard UNIX getrusage() function.
SuperPages are a way to increase TLB coverage by conglomerating (physically and virtually) adjacent pages into larger pages, that then need only a single TLB entry to map, and to explore optimum page table layout for large sparse address spaces.
- Threading performance is another area we've been working in.
UserLevelDrivers --- moving device drivers into User Space.
New work
We may be starting to explore ClusterFileSystems
- We are going to look at TCP/IP performance issues in current 2.5 series Linux, for IPv4 and IPv6.
We are looking into the implementation details of alternate page tables known as VariableRadixPageTables.
We are part of the Gelato federation's Scalability focus group and are working with others to measure and enhance Linux scalability.
