Michal Sojka, Czech Technical University in Prague
Karel Kočí, Czech Technical University in Prague

Linux kernel performance is a key parameter for many applications and tuning the kernel for optimal performance can be a challenging task. One reason is that there are many knobs one can use to tweak the performance. One such knob is compile-time configuration of the Linux kernel and in this paper, we are interested in how this configuration influences system response-time (latency), which is an important parameter for real-time applications.

We developed a tool that uses a SAT solver to systematically generate valid kernel configurations. For each configuration (typically, we have several thousands configurations) the kernel is compiled, booted and a set of benchmarks is executed. The benchmark results are processed and we try to calculate the contribution of individual configuration options to the benchmark results.

The benchmark used in this paper is the well-known cyclictest utility. We run our tool on several Linux kernel versions and architectures and report the results found.