Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 10, Kernel

#90 Use CKO to Make Your Desktop Go to 11

HACK

will be 1,000 interrupts per second. This means the timer will trigger an

interrupt every millisecond. You can set the number lower, but you

shouldn’t set it higher. A higher number (more interrupts per second) can

improve or degrade performance depending on your machine’s speed. If

you’re running anything better than a ‘486 on your desktop, you should be

happy with the default setting of 1,000. But by all means, feel free to drop it

down to 500, and see how that affects the kind of desktop computing that

suits your style. You never know, the less overhead of having to interrupt

the CPU so often might actually improve performance, depending on what

kind of work or play you are doing.

The rest of the special configuration optimizations are riskier, so stop here

for now. Finish configuring the kernel for your machine’s specifications,

build it, and add it to your bootloader to try it out.

Tweaking CKO in Real Time

Memory and disk swapping are two of the most critical factors in desktop

performance. A system that is heavily swapping to disk is stealing time from

the tasks you want to perform without interruption, such as playing music

or videos. The CKO kernel addresses this by setting a “watermark” thresh-

old for the amount of memory applications can use before the kernel starts

to do what could be intrusive swapping. The default ...