2. Kernel
Control groups are a feature of the Linux kernel introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Each control group is a set of tasks on a system that have been grouped together to better manage their interaction with system hardware. Control groups can be tracked to monitor the system resources that they use. Additionally, system administrators can use control group infrastructure to allow or to deny specific control groups access to system resources such as memory, CPUs (or groups of CPUs), networking, I/O, or the scheduler.
group_idle, provides better throughput with control groups while maintaining fairness.
Note
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 introduces support for Receive Packet Steering (RPS) and Receive Flow Steering (RFS). Receive Packet Steering allows incoming network packets to be processed in parallel over multiple CPU cores. Receive Flow Steering chooses the optimal CPU to process network data intended for a specific application.
kdump is an advanced crash dumping mechanism. When enabled, the system is booted from the context of another kernel. This second kernel reserves a small amount of memory, and its only purpose is to capture the core dump image in case the system crashes.
The kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides the following notable performance improvements:
- Updates and improvements to Transparent Huge Pages (THP) support
- Updates to perf_event, adding the new perf lock feature to better analyze lock events.
- kprobes jump optimization, reducing overhead and enhancing SystemTap performance.
- Updates to i7300_edac and i7core_edac, providing support for monitoring of memory errors on motherboards using Intel 7300 chipset
