Percona Live 2019

Percona Live 2019

I will be speaking at this year’s Percona Live event. Percona Live 2019 takes place in Austin, Texas from May 28-30, 2019 at the Hyatt Regency . You can register for the event and check out the schedule of talks. See you there.

About Percona Live

Percona Live conferences provide the open source database community with an opportunity to discover and discuss the latest open source trends, technologies and innovations. The conference includes the best and brightest innovators and influencers in the open source database industry.

Our daily sessions, day-one tutorials, demonstrations, keynotes and events provide access to what is happening NOW in the world of open source databases. At the conference, you can mingle with all levels of the database community: DBAs, developers, C-level executives and the latest database technology trend-setters.

This conference provides an opportunity to network with peers and technology professionals by uniting the open source database community to share their knowledge, experience and use cases.

Percona Live is the place to learn about how open source database technology can power your applications, improve your websites and solve your critical database issues.

A Discussion on the Advantages Afforded MySQL DBaaS offerings hosted on Intel’s Next Gen Platform

David Cohen - Intel, Steve Scargall - Intel

In this talk, we discuss the use of the open source MySQL Community Edition and Percona Server projects and Intel’s Cascade Lake server platform as the primary building blocks for hosting a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) deployment. Data demonstrating the advantage of this configuration will be presented. Emphasis will be on deployment of an offering that provides developers with self-service, on-demand delivery of databases that run over shared infrastructure in a multi-tenant environment. Demand for DBaaS from a diverse span of market segments has driven the large Cloud Service Providers to invest in the buildout such offerings.

Today, these offerings are widely available from Multiple Cloud Providers. Until recently, however, organizations wanting to provide DBaaS from within their own data centers were left without good options. This demand is set to be addressed with the emergence of several open source projects. A second, intersecting trend is the imminent release of Intel’s next-generation Cascade Lake XEON platform and its support for byte-addressable, persistent memory via the Intel(R) Optane(TM) DC Persistent Memory product.

Our talk will dive into the intersection of these two trends starting with an overview of the Cloud Native DBaaS model. Next, a concrete description of a deployment model using Percona’s MySQL and MyRocks distributions will be introduced. This model will be supported by a two-fold, data-driven discussion on performance and density. First, a performance characterization for both the InnoDB and MyRocks storage engines is presented with the focus on comparing/contrasting the use of NVMe vis-a-vis Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. For the latter, we include Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory volumes in fsdax as well as sector modes. Secondly, data on database instance density using a single Intel Cascade Lake server outfitted with NVMe vis-a-vis Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory will be presented. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the results and how they have influenced our plans for further work in MySQL CE/Percona Server open source projects going forward.

Linux Device Mapper WriteCache (dm-writecache) performance improvements in Linux Kernel 5.8

Linux Device Mapper WriteCache (dm-writecache) performance improvements in Linux Kernel 5.8

The Linux ‘dm-writecache’ target allows for writeback caching of newly written data to an SSD or NVMe using persistent memory will achieve much better performance in Linux Kernel 5.8.

Red Hat developer Mikulas Patocka has been working to enhance the dm-writecache performance using Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) as the cache device.

The performance optimization now queued for Linux 5.8 is making use of CLFLUSHOPT within dm-writecache when available instead of MOVNTI. CLFLUSHOPT is one of Intel’s persistent memory instructions that allows for optimized flushing of cache lines by supporting greater concurrency. The CLFLUSHOPT instruction has been supported on Intel servers since Skylake and on AMD since Zen.

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Linux Kernel v6.17 is Released: This is What's New for Compute Express Link (CXL)

Linux Kernel v6.17 is Released: This is What's New for Compute Express Link (CXL)

The Linux Kernel v6.17 release brings several improvements and additions related to Compute Express Link (CXL) technology.

Release Highlights

Linux Kernel v6.17 includes 32 commits to the CXL and DAX subsystems:

CategoryCommits
New Features & Hardware1
Bug Fixes6
Refactoring & Cleanup3
Other22

The v6.17 cycle for CXL and DAX is a consolidation release rather than a feature-heavy one, with 32 commits that reflect the subsystem maturing around correctness, specification compliance, and architectural hygiene. The most visible theme is alignment with CXL specification revision 3.2: the Common Event Record has been updated to match the new spec, the Memory Sparing Event Record gains kernel tracing support for the first time, and additional validity checks land for corrected volatile memory error (CVME) counts in both DRAM and General Media Event Records. This work strengthens the kernel’s ability to correctly interpret and surface CXL RAS events to userspace tooling and monitoring infrastructure.

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How To Install a Mainline Linux Kernel in Ubuntu

Note: This article was updated on Thursday, July 31st, 2025 and will work with newer Ubuntu releases.

By default, Ubuntu systems run with the Ubuntu kernels provided by the Ubuntu repositories. To get unmodified upstream kernels that have new features or to confirm that upstream has fixed a specific issue, we often need to install the mainline Kernel. The mainline kernel is the most recent version of the Linux kernel released by the Linux Kernel Organization. It undergoes several stages of development, including merge windows, release candidates, and final releases. Mainline kernels are designed to offer the latest features and improvements, making them attractive to developers and power users. Kernel.org lists the available Kernel versions.

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