The Beaverton, Oregon-based non-profit Linux advocacy center said the enhancements were the result of community development project that included the likes of Red Hat, Novell, Intel, IBM, HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, NTT and VA Linux.

The improvements to the SystemTap systems profiling tool enables administrators and developers to debug a live production system in real-time, without performance degradation or recompilation, according to OSDL.

Meanwhile, enhancements to the kdump crash dumping mechanism will improve the ability to create crash dumps that can be analyzed offline in the event of a system crash. Kdump is is especially significant since it represents the first crash dump tool accepted into the mainline kernel, said Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton.