Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

3
Technical Overview

www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Contents

3 Purpose

4 Capabilities

4 Virtualization

5 Development and deployment tools

7 Hardware enablement
7 Hardware platform features and performance enhancements
7 Device drivers

8 Filesystem and storage

9 System services

10 Cluster

11 Conclusion

2 www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Purpose
In January of 2009, Red Hat delivered the latest release in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family. In keeping
with Red Hat’s goals of stable, scalable, and supportable high-performance open source software, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.3 delivers enhancements to the core operating system, the Linux developer environment,
and the integrated infrastructure. Although there are nearly 3,400 separate changes comprising Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.3, this paper will concentrate on the new platform features that are relevant for devel-
opers, system administrators, and IT architects. New tools for performance and debugging make Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.3 easier to use for Linux developers and maintains the ABI/API stability that they expect
from a Red Hat subscription. For Java developers, the first certified Open Source JDK is included with this
release. By integrating OpenJDK with the operating system, Red Hat becomes one of the few companies that
has a complete enterprise Java environment.

Red Hat works very closely with the IHV community and it is reflected in the expanded hardware support in
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3. Full support for Intel’s next-generation Nehalem processors and AMD’s next
chipset are included in this release. By working collaboratively, the CPU advancements in virtualization will
be immediately available to those Red Hat subscribers when they acquire the latest hardware. In addition,
Red Hat provides several new options for network storage and file systems to meet the diverse needs of
Red Hat customers. Virtualization performance and management shows the results of continuous improve-
ment as Red Hat sets new levels of scalability in both physical and virtual operations.

Before describing new features, it is important to keep in mind that the key values of any update Red Hat
Enterprise Linux release are the hundreds of fixes that won’t get detailed mention in this whitepaper. These
fixes comprise the majority of the maintenance work that makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux the leading
enterprise distribution. They address widely diverse bugs discovered during Red Hat’s ongoing proactive
testing initiatives, as well as through customer reports. Of equal importance is Red Hat’s ongoing vigilance
to plug all known security vulnerabilities. Red Hat Enterprise Linux update releases aggregate the full
collection of bug fixes and security hardening into a fully integrated and tested release distribution. This
work is the cornerstone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The remainder of this whitepaper focuses on the new
features which debut in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.

www.redhat.com 3
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Capabilities
This paper is organized into functional areas. Note that some features span multiple functional
areas, including:

• Virtualization: describing scalability and performance enhancements

• Development / deployment tools

• Hardware enablement: including performance enhancements and subsections on platform features

• Filesystem and storage: enhancements above the basic block driver layer

• System services: including new security features and performance tuning

• Cluster: storage and control capabilities

Changes in each of these areas are described in the upcoming sections. Please keep in mind that the paper
contains only high-level summary information and is not comprehensive.

Virtualization
One of the most compelling features that debuted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was fully integrated support
for virtualization. A huge amount of work went into the integration, all aimed at providing customers with a
simple and consistent configuration and operation experience. Virtualization remains a substantial emphasis
for Red Hat’s development team, continuing the improvements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.

Since the initial delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March 2007, the growing scalability of x86-64-
based hardware has provided the motivation to support increasingly large virtualization platforms. In
addition to enhancements to the core hypervisor (hosting) layer, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also received
improved guest capabilities. These enhancements provide benefits for customers who wish to deploy a
few large guest instances, and also those who wish to deploy numerous smaller guests. Both deployment
styles are valid, as customers are increasingly using virtualization to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by
increasing system management flexibility, for example by enabling migration of workloads based on growth
needs, and for high availability, such as via guest instance failover and migration for planned maintenance.
Examples of the scalability enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3,1 include:

• Support for up to physical 126 CPUs and 32 CPUs per virtual server

• Support for up to 1TB of memory per server and 80GB per virtual server

• Support for more than 16 disks per guest

• Support for more than four network adapters per guest

1 System scalability limits describe the practical software support limits. Certification of hardware configurations is
dependent on Red Hat’s requirements of passing the certification test suite and availability of systems for Red Hat’s
development and test teams to have direct access to for testing purposes.

4 www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Improved paravirtualization has been an important factor in driving the demand for increased scalability. In
traditional fully virtualized environments, application workloads that had high levels of network and disk IO
could incur up to 30 percent performance overhead compared to bare-metal deployments. Paravirtualization
provides device drivers that cleanly plug into older Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, which operate as
virtualized guests in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. These paravirtualization device drivers are able to utilize
enhanced hardware capabilities to bypass the majority of the virtualization overhead, resulting in minimal
performance degradation. This allows IO-intensive applications to become candidates for virtualization.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes enhancements to the previously existing paravirtualization drivers as
well as optimizations such as utilizing large 2MB page tables. These paravirtualization enhancements enable
deployment of applications such as database and messaging workloads in virtualized environments, thereby
driving the need for increasingly larger hardware configurations.

Another new virtualization feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is libvirt-cim. Since the initial release of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat has provided an abstraction layer called libvirt as the system manage-
ment interface to virtualization. Libvirt is designed to hide the differences and changes in low-level
virtualization implementations and changing interfaces from the system management tools. The libvirt
library has proven popular and has been increasingly adopted and utilized by a variety of system manage-
ment tool vendors. This benefits customers, who can choose the tools with which they are familiar and which
best meet their use cases. The vibrant community that has rallied around libvirt has truly been a win-win.
Meanwhile, numerous commercial system management frameworks utilize an architecture called Common
Information Model (CIM) as the interface to interact with managed services. Combining the features of
both management standards, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 introduces libvirt-cim, widening the set of
virtualization configuration and operational management capabilities to include CIM compliant interfaces.

Development and deployment tools

SystemTap

A compelling new feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is called SystemTap. This utility provides
groundbreaking new capabilities for application performance monitoring and problem diagnosis. What
makes SystemTap special is the fact that it enables customers to dynamically monitor applications live in
production deployments. For example, SystemTap allows for the creation of runtime trace points where
performance-related statistics can be gathered. As useful as raw performance statistics are, SystemTap
takes it a step further by providing a scripting language which allows for dynamic insertion of runtime
code. This allows for sophisticated instrumentation. For example, it is possible to trigger the execution
of debugging code when the value of a certain parameter exceeds a threshold value. Previously, it
was necessary to build a version of the application with the debug code and deploy it into production
environments in order to diagnose issues. In practice, that approach is problematic because complex
production environments consist of layers of software like kernel, operating system libraries, middleware,
and business logic, which are often provided by a variety of vendors. The prospect of instrumenting and
delivering new debug versions into production environments to diagnose issues was extremely time-
consuming at best.

www.redhat.com 5
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

SystemTap overcomes these obstacles by enabling dynamic addition of diagnostic code at runtime. This
obviates the need for custom debug versions of software. Instead, all that is needed is the creation of small
debug modules, referred to as SystemTap scripts, which get dynamically loaded onto the running system to
produce the desired diagnostic information. SystemTap capabilities span from low-level kernel, to runtime
system libraries and up through the application stack. For example, it is possible to diagnose whether
performance bottlenecks are in the kernel, glibc, middleware, or application layer. By using SystemTap the
respective layer was quickly determined and from there, the SystemTap capabilities were used to drill down
to the root cause.

To help educate Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers on the benefits of SystemTap, a Beginner’s Guide is
included, as is a large set of example SystemTap scripts. These and other documentation are available on
the SystemTap documentation page: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/documentation.html.

OpenJDK(TM)

Red Hat and its customers understand the power of open source collaborative development. That is why
the introduction of the industry’s first product version of an open source Java™ runtime is exciting news.
Red Hat engineers have worked closely with Sun and the community to produce this release, which is a
full implementation of the Sun Java SE 1.6 specification and was tested against the Java SE 1.6 Technical
Compatibility Kit with zero failures. The existence of a truly open community for Java™ runtime development
opens up huge potential for optimization of Java™ on the Linux platform. Beyond the base platform, Java™
is highly instrumental to Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as well as the high-performance Red Hat
Enterprise MRG Messaging offering. Watch for future optimizations of Red Hat’s complete Java™ stack.

GCC 4.3

Red Hat’s tools team is a driving force behind rapid innovation in the gcc compiler and associated library and
diagnostic tools suite, and gcc is the compiler included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The latest release of the
compiler, gcc 4.3, is provided as a technology preview in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 for use in develop-
ment environments. This release provides many advances over the previous compiler, gcc 4.1, including:

• Experimental C++0x support in C++ as well as in libstdc++ options are available for compliance checking

• Interprocedural optimization and inlining performed on static single assignment

• Improved math optimizations via inclusion of the MPFR library

• Vectorizer enabled by default at -O3

• Warray-bounds added to enable bounds checking where possible

• GCJ now uses the eclipse compiler, enabling all Java 1.5 features

• Many libstdc++ improvements and features including TR1 support and parallel support

• Support for the OpenMP 3.0 standard

• Many other smaller optimization and target tuning performance enhancements

Complete details of the enhancements in GCC 4.3 and GCC 4.2 can be found at
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html and http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html.

6 www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Hardware enablement

Hardware platform features and performance enhancements

Historically, the challenge of providing support for hundreds of new hardware devices could be limited
to basic system bring-up tasks with some performance optimization. While this entails a substantial effort
to this day with the close cooperation of Red Hat partners, including chip vendors, OEMs, and peripheral
providers, exploiting modern, complex system hardware capabilities often necessitates additional,
sophisticated software. To summarize just a few of the many hardware-related features in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.3:

• Intel® Tylersburg / Nehalem platform: Intel’s newest generation of motherboards is called the Intel®
Tylersburg / Nehalem platform. Through an intensive development initiative between Intel and Red Hat
engineers, the upstream community and OEM partners, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 contains
performance optimizations for the new platform. Initial benchmarks have demonstrated dramatic
performance improvements over the previous generation of processors.

• Power management: operational cost savings and physical space considerations drive the need for
higher efficiency and low power consumption. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes low-level kernel
optimizations aimed at operating equipment efficiently in the lowest possible power states. This includes
exploiting the new deep C states available on the Intel® Tylersburg / Nehalem platform. Additionally, the
inclusion of ACPI T-state support facilitates effective processor throttling.

• I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU): Certain AMD processors and supporting chipsets have an
IOMMU, which is a service processor that optimizes the passing of data between system IO devices and
main memory. New optimizations are provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 to support secure DMA
transfers. This is particularly useful in virtualized deployments to provide hardware-level I/O isolation
between guests. The kernel boot option for enabling the driver is ‘iommu=”amd”’ and device isolation
is enabled by ‘amd_iommu=”isolation.”

Device drivers

• Every Red Hat Enterprise Linux update release includes a large number of device driver updates that
enable new hardware, optimize performance, and support new features. Updated drivers are provided in
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 for disk, network, both wired and wireless, graphics, and a variety of other
peripherals. The release notes itemize driver enhancements and provide full details. But here are a few
categories of driver types which are new to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and warrant mention:

• dmraid: Historically, RAID storage adapters tended to be high-end add-on devices, usually utilized
exclusively in high-end server configurations. Recently, Intel began shipping hardware-based RAID
features, called dmraid, on some newer motherboards. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes the device
drivers for dmraid as well as a configuration management interface in the anaconda installer (including
kickstart). Support was provided for RAID levels 0, 1 in prior Red Hat Enterprise Linux updates, while
support for RAID level 5 has been added in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3.

www.redhat.com 7
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

• iSCSI target support: is now fully supported, allowing customers the option of efficiently accessing iSCSI
storage servers deployed in their environment.

• FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet): is a new alternative to approaches such as NFS and iSCSI for
network based storage. FCoE allows a convergence of storage and networking traffic on a single adapter.
It does this while maintaining a high degree of compatibility with Fibre Channel, including the guarantees
for reliable performance that the Fibre Channel protocol provides. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 provides
full support for FCoE on three specialized hardware implementations. These include Cisco fnic driver,
the Emulex lpfc driver, and the QLogic qla2xx driver. Support for FCoE over a standard Ethernet card is
available as a technology preview. 2

Filesystem and storage

Storage

In addition to the above-mentioned device driver enhancements, there are new capabilities in the
upper layers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s storage stack, such as at the volume management layer.
Key highlights include:

• LVM cluster 2-way mirroring is now fully supported in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
edition. Cluster mirroring is a particularly useful feature for virtualized environments, which typically
require consistent cluster storage when using virtual server live migration.

• Speedups in system boot and startup time in LVM deployments by more effective usage of the lvmcache.

• Block device encryption support, dm-crypt, and system integration have been enhanced in the
anaconda installer enabling encrypted support for the root filesystem as well as swap partition.
Encrypted filesystems are well-suited for laptop usage, but are additionally finding increased use in
server environments where they help mitigate concerns for sensitive data falling into the wrong hands
with the disposal of old hardware.

Filesystem

A variety of filesystem enhancements appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, ranging from new filesystem
types to improved interoperability. Highlights of the filesystem enhancements include:

• GFS2 is fully supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Advanced Platform edition, which was previously
available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a technology preview. GFS2 is a second-generation parallel,
fully coherent cluster filesystem that delivers enhanced performance and scalability beyond the
initial GFS1 implementation. Cluster filesystems are becoming increasingly important in virtualizated
environments as they form a consistent storage pool over which live migration and failover of virtualized
guests can be performed. They also form a highly available platform for many critical datacenter
applications like web or file servers.

2 Technology preview, tech preview. The majority of new features provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases are fully
supported, however it is also common for releases to include some new features which are not sufficiently mature to
be ready for fully supported production deployment. To provide customers with early access to these promising new
features, and to enable them to participate in validation testing, these features are designated as tech preview.

8 www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

• The default filesystem in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is ext3. An incremental evolution to ext3 debuts
in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and is unsurprisingly called ext4. The primary objective of ext4 is
to provide scalability enhancements, these are particularly beneficial as the size of disks has grown
substantially over the years. Ext4 can also create new filesystems (mkfs) and perform consistency
checks and repairs after an unclean shutdown much more rapidly than ext3. It is provided as technology
preview status.

• eCryptfs fixes and integration are also available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3. The above storage
subsection referenced dmraid, which provides encryption at the LVM block device layer. An alternative
encryption approach is to perform it at the filesystem layer. There are tradeoffs in terms of flexibility
and ease of storage management which determine whether block-layer or filesystem-layer encryption is
most effective, depending on the use case. While eCryptfs first appeared in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes numerous fixes and full integration with the anaconda installer,
enabling system administrators to easily configure encrypted filesystems. eCryptfs is provided as tech
preview status.

System services
• Microsoft Windows®3 interoperability enhancements:

• CIFS is a network-based filesystem-based protocol that enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems
to be either client or server to storage among heterogeneous Linux/Windows environments. New
to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 are security provisions enabling usage of kerberos credentials.

• Samba is a suite of interoperability tools allowing integration of user account data, filesystem sharing
and active directory integration. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 updates to the most recent samba suite
bringing enhanced integration with Windows Vista.

• The Linux kernel strives to do dynamic, adaptive tuning without necessitating manual performance
tuning by the system administrator. While the number of tuning parameters which adaptively self-
tune is growing, there remain a number of static tuning parameters which, depending on hardware
configuration and application workload, can be modified to yield performance benefits. All kernel tuning
parameters have a single default value and, in practice, this one-size-fits-all approach can be suboptimal,
necessitating manual tuning. Through experience working with customers to optimize large production
environments, a number of recognized patterns where similar tuning settings are beneficial have been
identified. Consequently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes a new utility, ktune, a script which adjusts
kernel tuning parameters to a profile suited for large memory systems, larger than 64 GB, that have high
disk and network IO rates. Customers with large systems may wish to experiment with ktune and observe
whether it can provide performance benefits. ktune is delivered as a separate, optional script because,
although it was considered too invasive to modify default kernel parameters in a update release, Red Hat
wanted customers to benefit from its performance tuning experience. Even if you do not elect to run the
ktune script on your server as-is, it may be helpful to look at the parameters it alters; some adjustment of
individual settings may be applicable in your environment. The ktune script is provided as a technology
preview and Red Hat invites customer feedback.

3 Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

www.redhat.com 9
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

• The CUPS printing subsystem now includes kerberos authentication.

• The RPM software package manager utility has received a substantial number of performance
enhancements and fixes.

• The audit subsystem has been enhanced to include remote logging functionality.

• The NetworkManager daemon now provides support for sharing multiple active connections — for
example to bridge other laptops through a common bluetooth phone. Mobile broadband support is
provided for a select set of devices, and static IP addresses are now configurable.

Cluster
The clustering capabilities provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, included in the Advanced Platform
edition, are gaining increased usage as a high-availability augmentation to the virtualization capabilities.
Examples include automated failover of virtualized guests.

• Cluster volume management and filesystems are a foundational underpinning of virtualized guest
migration, and provide a uniform, consistent view of storage regardless of which computer the
virtualized guest is running on. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 enhancements for cluster storage include:

• The LVM volume manager now supports cluster volume 2-way mirroring.

• The GFS2 parallel cluster filesystem is now fully supported for use in production deployments.

• A fencing agent has been provided for the VMware ESX and VirtualCenter server as a technology
preview. This is a control module which ensures that a failed VMware instance is fully terminated
before initiating restart, thus preventing concurrently running multiple instances. This capability
enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual guests to be clustered on a VMware server.

10 www.redhat.com
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Technical Overview

Conclusion
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 provides many new features, bug fixes, and security improvements. As
Red Hat’s flagship product, it provides enterprise readiness and compatibility across updates. The
preservation of compatibility is one of the principal benefits that differentiate Red Hat Enterprise Linux
releases from general upstream community development, which in many cases tends to be revolutionary
rather than evolutionary. While the rapid pace of upstream advancement yields plentiful innovation from
which customers and developers eventually benefit, invasive, disruptive, or incompatible features are
normally deferred to major releases and not included in update Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.
Through strict vigilance to compatibility and stability, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
with confidence without any need to recertify their application and middleware stacks.

www.redhat.com 11
Red Hat Sales and Inquiries North America

1-888-REDHAT1
www.redhat.com

© 2009 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. “Red Hat,” Red Hat Linux, the Red Hat “Shadowman” logo, and the products listed are www.redhat.com
trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the US and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. #923069_0109