CentOS and Oracle Release Their RHEL 6.2 Clones!
Well, that was quick! No sooner than 6.1 is out, now 6.2 is out! Dewd!
CentOS and Oracle release their Red Hat 6.2 clones
“The CentOS project must have overclocked its coffeemakers to the max, as the team released CentOS 6.2 only a week after it let go with CentOS 6.1. As noted by The H, the surprise appearance of CentOS 6.2 coincided with Oracle’s release of its own RHEL clone Oracle Linux 6.2 (see farther below).
CentOS 6.1 was almost seven months in the making, but followed its Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL) 6.1 master at a faster clip than did CentOS 6.0 in its imitation of RHEL 6.0. The CentOS 6.2 release bests that pace by a long shot, trailing RHEL 6.2 by only two weeks.
The community-driven, freely available CentOS 6.2 offers almost all the non-proprietary portions of RHEL 6.2, and is said to be 100 percent binary compatible. The distribution is available for i386 and x86_64 architectures.
Oracle Linux 6.2
Oracle Linux is a RHEL clone of a different stripe, as adds a RHEL-based Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. In Oracle Linux 6.2, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel appears to be the main addition to the RHEL 6.2 foundation. The kernel, which is optimized for performance on Oracle software, was claimed by Oracle last year to be more than 75 percent faster than a RHEL kernel in OLTP performance, and 200 percent faster than Infiniband messaging.The kernel was also said to provide optimizations for large NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) servers, plus improved power management and energy efficiency.
Both the CentOS and Oracle Linux releases are based on a RHEL 6.2 upgrade that introduced some fairly significant performance and scalability enhancements, especially on multicore platforms. Improvements were said to have been applied to resource management, high availability, storage and file system, and identity management components.
As an indication of its improved scalability on multicore systems, the release scored an all-time-high 22,000 users on the SAP SD benchmark, according to Red Hat.
In addition, RHEL 6.2’s new Transmit Packet Steering (XPS) technology, which lets administrators pre-assign a CPU to handle network transmission requests, can improve network throughput by up to 30 percent, says Red Hat. The new release also offers file system enhancements that reduce read-write times and boost overall system utilization, claims the company.”