Brendan Gregg keynoted the Southern California Area Linux Expo this year, to a packed room, with this talk: How does Linux system performance compare to other OSes, particularly the performance-focused Solaris family? What features inspired by them could be added to Linux? Both are bristling with performance features and optimizations, and it’s difficult enough to fully understand Read More…

Brendan Gregg keynoted the Southern California Area Linux Expo this year, to a packed room, with this talk:

How does Linux system performance compare to other OSes, particularly the performance-focused Solaris family? What features inspired by them could be added to Linux?

Both are bristling with performance features and optimizations, and it’s difficult enough to fully understand the performance of the Linux kernel and its distributions, let alone other kernels and OSes for comparison. Brendan Gregg has unique insight into the performance features and analysis capabilities of both Linux and Solaris-based systems, which he covers in depth in his new book:Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. He also works at Joyent, a high performance cloud provider, where OS performance is core to the business, and frequently debugs head-to-head performance comparisons. It’s not just each OS’s baseline performance that matters, but also their analysis tools, and how quickly potential customer benchmarks can be debugged and tuned. This talk will include specific areas where SmartOS – an open source illumos kernel derivative of OpenSolaris – often beats Linux performance, and vice-versa. How does Linux compare today, and what can it do next? … and what could the Solaris family learn from Linux?

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