CentOS 7 to arrive in July with performance boost
Red Hat released RHEL 7 on June 10th which means the CentOS 7 community got to work, to prep their release based on the source. It is currently in “QA” release for review and will go to “GA” release (general availability) sometime in July.
The big news, at least for me, is performance improvements over CentOS 6.5
Red Hat claims 11% to 25% speed increase depending on workload:
Is that plausible from just an OS upgrade? Possibly, depending on better use of hardware and how much contention is going on. CentOS 7 will finally bring the linux 3.10 kernel to replace the 2.6.32 kernel in CentOS 6.5 – this means the elimination of the “big kernel lock” and better memory management.
7 will also bring the XFS filesystem as a default, alternative to EXT4. I am not sold on this change. I have seen a number of benchmarks that show EXT4 is faster in many cases, by a significant percent, over XFS (you can still use EXT4 of course). Apparently GRUB was also replaced with GRUB2 which is something I have to research and learn since it is critical for boot.
Want to read about all the new stuff for yourself?
Try the Red Hat release notes or save it for later in PDF format.
Initially there is no direct upgrade path for CentOS 6.5 to 7.
But they are discussing it and promise to explore after the GA release.
_ck_ says... 