[Haifux] SSD and linux

[Muli Ben-Yehuda]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 12:31:09PM +0300, Doron Zuckerman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a question regarding the linux kernel (for those of you who are
> familiar with it).
> 
> I'm looking for a way to add a change to the linux kernel in order to check
> if I can make it more compatible with my Asus EEE-PC.
> I would like to change the kernel in such way that it will not do a context
> switch every time there is a page fault
> and will wait for the required page to be brought from the SSD (Solid State
> Drive), then continue as usual.

We context switch because the task (thread) cannot continue working
until the page is paged in from the disk. If we don't context switch,
and the thread cannot continue running until the page fault is
resolved, what will the OS do in the meantime?

Note that even though the EEE has an SSD drive, it's still several
orders of magnitude slower than the time the context switch takes.

Cheers,
Muli
-- 
Workshop on I/O Virtualization (WIOV '08)
Co-located with OSDI '08, Dec 2008, San Diego, CA
http://www.usenix.org/wiov08