Chapter 2. Kernel

Support for the Power Management Quality Of Service (pm_qos) infrastructure has been added in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8. The pm_qos interface provides a kernel and user mode interface for registering performance expectations by drivers, subsystems and user space applications for one of the currently supported pm_qos parameters: cpu_dma_latency, network_latency, network_throughput. For more information, refer to /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-<VERSION>/Documentation/power/pm_qos_interface.txt.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 provides PCIe 3.0 full function support by adding ID-based ordering, OBFF (Optimized Buffer Flush/Fill) enable/disable support, and latency tolerance reporting enable/disable support.

Support for ALSA HD Audio on Intel's next Platform Controller Hub has been added.

Device IDs have been added to provide full support of Intel's next Platform Controller Hub for the following drivers: SATA, SMBus, USB, Audio, Watchdog, I2C.

Support for the StarTech 1 Port PCI Express Parallel Port device has been added.

Support for the configure-pe RTAS (RunTime Abstraction Services) call on the PowerPC platform has been added.

The JSM driver has been updated to support the Bell2 (with PLX chip) 2-port adapter on IBM POWER7 systems. Additionally, EEH support has been added to the JSM driver.