Linux works well for most jobs, but to get it to work great requires kernel tuning, and that’s never easy. ByteDance has a proposal to make this easier.
At the Linux Plumbers Conference, the invite-only meeting for the top Linux kernel developers, ByteDance Linux Kernel Engineer Cong Wang, proposed that we use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to tune the Linux kernel for the maximum results for specific workloads.
Generally speaking, the Linux kernel works just fine for most tasks. But, to get the most from it for a particular job, you must fine-tune it by setting its parameters for the best possible results. There’s only one little problem with this approach. There are thousands of parameters. Even for a Linux expert, tuning them for optimal performance is a long, hard job. And, of course, different workloads require different tunings for different sets of Linux kernel parameters. Thus, as Wang said, “In large-scale data centers like ByteDance’s, it has become nearly impossible to tune Linux kernel parameters manually for hundreds of different workloads.”
TIL: ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) uses Linux for their Platform!
