Linux kernel 2.6.38 tips up

THE LINUX PROJECT has released its second major Linux kernel of 2011, version 2.6.38.

This latest kernel release includes several performance enhancements, most of which will benefit large server implementations and virtualisation environments, according to Internet News.

One significant improvement is called Transparent Hugepages (THP), which increases the memory allocation size from 4KB to 2MB. Tim Burke, VP of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, said it regarded this as so important that the company led the implementation in order to be able to include it in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

He explained that THP reduces the number of memory allocations required and that this leverages higher performance hardware to make Linux run significantly faster.

A somewhat more esoteric advance in this Linux kernel is called Transmit Packet Steering (XPS), which Burke said will provide some performance improvement in using multi-queue network cards in multi-processor systems. It's not for your own desktop system then, clearly.

This Linux kernel also has a new design for Read-Copy-Update path-name lookup, which apparently will also mostly benefit server workloads, as in email servers.

There are also improvements to automatic process grouping, which will help Linux better manage the allocation and control of many processes in multi-cpu systems.

People running some large Linux server systems will look forward to getting their hands on this latest kernel to compile it themselves and put it through some system performance testing. It might also show up fairly soon in a Red Hat Fedora release, and perhaps even unstable development repositories at Debian, Opensuse and others.

However, it will take about six months to a year to filter down to most desktop Linux distributions, we imagine, and we'll be looking forward to it when it comes out. µ