New Linux tools from SGI

 Mountain View 09 Dec 99 SGI released several performance technology features to the Open Source Software community. Additionally, the company has released tools to enable Linux developers to greatly simplify the process for resolving bugs in enterprise Linux installations.

To facilitate optimizing database performance on enterprise-class Linux systems, recently released SGI technology includes support for database machines with large disk farms and efficient, parallel access to I/O. These features are based upon the company's industry-leading experience and expertise in developing large multiprocessor machines.

The key performance-enhancing components are:

  • Parallelization of the I/O path. The entire I/O path has been optimized to enable simultaneous requests to be executed independently on a multiprocessor. These optimizations make it possible for large numbers of disks to be kept active.
  • POSIX-compliant Asynchronous I/O Interfaces. These new interfaces allow an application to issue multiple I/O requests in parallel to ensure maximum throughput from large numbers of disks typically attached to database installations.
  • Direct Access to Disks. Databases frequently lay their data out directly on disks to avoid the overhead of filesystems. SGI has enhanced the existing raw I/O implementation in Linux (originally developed by Stephen Tweedie of Red Hat) to allow I/O requests to be handled in parallel on multiprocessors. Also, the data can be read/written directly to the user address space, without the need for data copying.

SGI has leveraged its considerable experience in developing and supporting multiprocessor Unix systems to provide a large number of tools to help accelerate the development of Linux and to efficiently diagnose problems at customer sites. These tools include the following:

  • Linux Kernel Crash Dump. LCRASH enables the kernel to save the memory image to disk in the case of system failure. New tools enable later analysis of the cause, thus minimizing system downtime. While this is a normal customer expectation for commercial UNIX systems, this is new for Linux.
  • Built-in Kernel Debugger. The KDB tool greatly eases and thus accelerates Linux kernel development. KDB provides many of the debugging facilities (breakpoints, back trace, single step, etc.) considered fundamental to application development, but until now unavailable to Linux kernel developers.
  • Kernel GNU Debugger. The KGDB extension to the kernel allows source-level debugging of one Linux system from another over a serial line or Ethernet using the standard debugger.
  • Performance analysis tools. SGI has added numerous performance analysis tools, including kernel profiling, lock metering and kernel event tracing. These tools greatly enhance the process of identifying the causes of performance problems in the kernel.

     

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