In this paper, we will present several operating system features that improved database performance under OLTP workload significantly, such as Huge TLB page to reduce DTLB misses as database uses large amount of shared memory and asynchronous I/O to accommodate high amount of random I/O without introducing the overhead of many I/O processes. We will also present many other kernel optimizations that were developed by Intel, Red Hat and the Linux community that improved the scalability and performance of Linux kernel, specifically the areas are: raw vary I/O, kernel data structure footprint reduction, global io_request_lock reduction, and storage device driver optimization.

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