Linux guru Linus Torvalds has accepted updates to the Hyper-V hypervisor, making the operating system boot faster.
Microsoft and Linux both see opportunities to strengthen each other. Consider the tech giant’s support for the open-source operating system through Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). That’s why Microsoft regularly releases updates that improve Linux’s performance or expand its functionality.
New accepted enhancements
In this context, Linus Torvalds has again accepted a number of enhancements developed by Microsoft experts for Linux 6.12. The updates, submitted by Microsoft’s Principal Architect at Azure Machine Learning, Wei Liu, involve upgrades for Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.
These include optimizing the hypervisor’s startup time on Linux by parallelizing hv_synic_init(), using helpers to read control registers in hv_snp_boot_ap(), and adding memory allocation checks in hv_fcopy_start.
Reduce Hyper-V startup time
Of these new additions, optimizing boot time is perhaps the most interesting. This upgrade ensures that concurrent execution of the hv_synic_init() function improves Hyper-V startup time on Linux for processors with multiple cores and so-called non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes.
An example shows that on a system with 1,780 CPUs, the startup process of hv_acpi_init() takes 3 seconds due to the “sequential synic initialization” of each CPU by hv_synic_init().
The potential of multiple CPUs is utilized by running these tasks in parallel, with each CPU running hv_synic_init() simultaneously. This reduces the startup time of the Hyper-V hypervisor on Linux for a system with 1,780 processors to 2 seconds. This represents an improvement of about 66 percent.
More information on this particular upgrade can be found here.
Also read: Linux is becoming a Real-Time Operating System: what does it mean?