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by kenOfYugen 3471 days ago
What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

Are there any real-life experiences? Would a different TCP stack such as mTCP[1] suffice?

1. http://shader.kaist.edu/mtcp/

4 comments

Intel is quite happy to ship CentOS Linux on its 64-core (256 hardware thread) Xeon Phi Knights landing dev boxes:

http://dap.xeonphi.com/

Here is Linux htop with 288 hardware threads on the higher end KL:

http://www.admin-magazine.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images...

Linux is already pretty comfy at 48+ cores (and more), probably especially so on a single socket.
> What modifications are required to be made to the linux kernel/tcp stack to take advantage of 48+ cores, in order to achieve a more linear scalability?

https://xkcd.com/619/ isn't a joke.

Linux is the default operating system of huge NUMA systems with hundreds of CPUs / thousands of cores.

They have put quite a bit of work into scaling, but that doesn't mean it's perfect yet.
Yes, if you want to run TCP/IP on it. But if you have bucks for it, it takes just a little bit more cash to get rid of packet IO altogether, and the network stack overhead along with it.