RHEA-2011:0894 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

Updated Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime packages are now available for Red Hat
Enterprise MRG 2.0.

Description

This update provides various enhancements for the following packages:

• The ibm-prtm package contains a utility and startup script for IBM BladeCenter

systems. It enables an Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver, and also
turns off the System Management Interrupts (SMI) generation, which improves
system response time to events.

• The python-linux-procfs package enables the extraction of information from the

/proc file system.

• The python-schedutils package provides an interface to the scheduler.
• The rtcheck package provides an application that tests the running system for

real-time capabilities. This program can be used by real-time-enabled programs
to determine if the environment they are in is suitable for them to run
correctly.

• The rtctl package comprises a set of scripts, which are used to manipulate the

scheduling priorities of groups of system threads.

• The rteval package contains a utility for measuring various aspects of

real-time behavior on systems under load. The script unpacks the hackbench and
kernel source code from the rteval-loads package, builds hackbench, and then
goes into a loop, running hackbench and compiling a kernel tree. During that
loop, the cyclictest program is run to measure event response time. After the
run time completes, a statistical analysis of the event response times is done
and printed to the screen.

• The rteval-loads package provides source code for system loads used by the

rteval package.

• The rt-setup package configures settings required by the Red Hat Enterprise

Linux real-time environment, such as creating the real-time group, adding
real-time user privileges to PAM (Pluggable Authentication Models), enabling the
configuration of kdump in real time, and disabling irqbalance by default.

• The rt-tests package includes a set of programs that test and measure various

components of real-time kernel behavior. This package measures timer, signal,
and hardware latency and tests the functioning of priority-inheritance mutexes.

• The tuna packages include graphical and command line interfaces for changing

scheduler and interrupt request (IRQ) settings. Changes can be made to CPUs, by
thread or at the IRQ level, taking into account the topology of multi-socket and
multi-core systems. Tuna gives the ability to isolate CPU cores and sockets for
use by a specific application or hardware device.

• The python-numeric package is a python module that provides support for

numerical operations for tuna.

This update provides a build of these packages for MRG 2.0, which is layered on
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. (BZ#704325)

Additionally, this update adds the following enhancements:

• The description of the rtcheck package has been updated to provide a clearer

overview of the package. (BZ#661896)

• On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the kernel-rt-firmware package is compliant

with the default firmware loading script. To retain compatibility with this
system, this update removes both the firmware loading script and the related
udev rule from the rt-setup package. (BZ#666955)

• Previously, the Linux scheduler bindings provided by the python-schedutils

package were unable to set the CPU affinity on systems with more than 64 cores.
With this update, the package was modified to dynamically allocate the required
space, allowing the CPU affinity to be successfully set on large core systems.
(BZ#676927)

Users of the Realtime capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 are advised to
upgrade to these updated packages, which add these enhancements. Note that the
system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red
Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• MRG Realtime 2 x86_64

Fixes

• BZ - 661896 - Update %description for rtcheck
• BZ - 666955 - Modify rt-setup for RHEL6
• BZ - 676927 - tuna under RHEL6.0 can't set cpu affinity on large core count machines
• BZ - 704325 - RT user-space packages for MRG 2.0 [RHEL6]

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)