2.7. Kernel

The dm-thinp targets, thin and thin-pool, provide a device mapper device with thin-provisioning and scalable snapshot capabilities. This feature is available as a Technology Preview.

Package: kernel-2.6.32-279

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, the kdump/kexec kernel dumping mechanism is enabled for IBM System z systems as a Technology Preview, in addition to the IBM System z stand-alone and hypervisor dumping mechanism. The auto-reserve threshold is set at 4 GB; therefore, any IBM System z system with more than 4 GB of memory has the kexec/kdump mechanism enabled.

Sufficient memory must be available because kdump reserves approximately 128 MB as default. This is especially important when performing an upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3. Sufficient disk space must also be available for storing the dump in case of a system crash. Kdump is limited to DASD or QETH networks as dump devices until kdump on SCSI disk is supported.

The following warning message may appear when kdump is initialized:

..no such file or directory

This message does not impact the dump functionality and can be ignored. You can configure or disable kdump via /etc/kdump.conf, system-config-kdump, or firstboot.

The following features are presented as Technology Previews:

Package: kernel-2.6.32-279

The audit package contains the user space utilities for storing and searching the audit records generated by the audit subsystem in the Linux 2.6 kernel. Within the audispd-plugins sub-package is a utility that allows for the transmission of audit events to a remote aggregating machine. This remote audit logging application, audisp-remote, is considered a Technology Preview in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Package: audispd-plugins-2.2-2

Linux containers provide a flexible approach to application runtime containment on bare-metal systems without the need to fully virtualize the workload. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides application level containers to separate and control the application resource usage policies via cgroups and namespaces. This release includes basic management of container life-cycle by allowing creation, editing and deletion of containers via the libvirt API and the virt-manager GUI. Linux Containers are a Technology Preview.

Packages: libvirt-0.9.10-21, virt-manager-0.9.0-14

A diagnostic pulse can now be issued on the IPMI interface using the fence_ipmilan agent. This new Technology Preview is used to force a kernel dump of a host if the host is configured to do so. Note that this feature is not a substitute for the off operation in a production cluster.

Package: fence-agents-3.1.5-17