At a macro level, Witham says the 2.6 version vastly improves application performance and throughput. In addition, here's a quick list of several other improvements to the 2.6 kernel, courtesy of OSDL:
- On the server:
- Better scalability and overall speed increase enabled by new processor scheduler and simultaneous multithreading and support for non-uniform memory access
- Can now run applications that access large blocks of memory
- Network file system is faster, more scalable and secure
- On the desktop:
- Preemptible feature enables kernel to be interrupted midtask
- New I/O scheduler to improve application's performance
- Wireless support
- Laptop power savings