Installation guide

ia64 Architecture

To resolve this issue, parameters should be enclosed with single quotes inside of double quotes (ie

parameters="vmhalt='LOGOFF'")

Note

The syntax structure of single quotes inside of double quotes is the default in Red hat

Enterprise Linux 5.

5.6. ia64 Architecture

• The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor filled out machine check architecture (MCA) records

differently to previous Intel Itanium processors. The cache check and bus check target identifiers

can now be different in some circumstances. The kernel has been updated to find the correct target

identifier.

• kprobe-booster is now supported on the ia64 and x86_64 architectures, allowing users to probe

kernel events much faster. This feature will also decrease the overhead caused by probing tools

(e.g. SystemTap and Kprobes) on servers running on 64-bit architecture.

• In this update, support for pselect() and ppoll() system calls has been added to the kernel.

6. Virtualization

This section contains information about updates made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux suite of

Virtualization tools.

6.1. Feature Updates

• The blktap (blocktap) userspace toolkit has been updated, providing the functionality to monitor the

transfer statistics of blktap backed virtualized guests.

• Support was added for the Intel Extended Page Table (EPT) feature, improving performance of fully

virtualized guests on hardware that supports EPT.

• e1000 network device emulation for guests has been added in this update, supporting only

Windows 2003 guests on the ia64 architecture. To use e1000 emulation, the xm command must be

used.

• Drivers for virtio, the platform for I/O virtualization in KVM, has been backported to Red Hat

Enterprise Linux 5.3 from Linux Kernel 2.6.27. These drivers will enable KVM guests to achieve

higher levels of I/O performance. Various userspace components such as: anaconda, kudzu, lvm,

selinux and mkinitrd have also been updated to support virtio devices.

• The native Linux kernel supports vmcoreinfo automatically, but, to setup kdump on dom0

domains, the kernel-xen-debuginfo package was needed. With this release, the kernel and

the hypervisor have been modified and now support vmcoreinfo reading and writing kdump natively.

Users needing to use kdump for de-bugging or other investigations on dom0 domains can now do

so without installing the debuginfo or debuginfo-common packages.