In addition to the proposed Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlocks for better performance, another interesting performance-enhancing patch series posted in the past 24 hours for the Linux kernel is for improving the performance of single-threaded tasks running on high core count CPU desktops / workstations / servers.

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi of SUSE posted the request for comments (RFC) patch series to better the performance of single-threaded tasks with today’s many-core CPUs. The optimization is focused around the Linux kernel’s “rss_stat” structure that holds statistics around the Resident Set Size (RSS) for the process with the amount of memory in use.