Rik van Riel is a kernel hacker and especially interested in memory management.

Scalability seems to be today's buzzword, being mentioned in every second post in *.advocacy newsgroups, glossy advertisements in magazines and even occasionally mentioned on TV. Ironically all this publicity only gives people a very rough idea of what scalability is and no idea at all of how scalability works and why it is so difficult.

In this presentation I will explain, from the point of view of the hardware, why scalability is so difficult. I will also explain some of the tricks that can be used by operating systems and applications in order to achieve scalability, these tricks will be illustrated by some of the changes which have been made to the 2.4 and 2.5 kernels.