From the 'E5 Inside' files:

Intel launched its' next generation Xeon E5 processor family last week, promising better raw compute performance and a new Data Direct I/O system. I wondered last week, how Linux vendors would be leveraging the E5, since Linux plays such a huge role in the server space.

In my initial inquiries, I heard back from HP and Dell and both those vendors mentioned they had certified their servers for E5 with Red Hat and SUSE. No mention of Ubuntu. So I checked in with Canonical/Ubuntu to see if in fact they are supporting E5 for the upcoming 12.04 Ubuntu Linux release.



The short answer: Absolutely.

"We have had over five years of technical collaboration with Intel across US, China, India and Europe, and that is now happening on a larger scale than ever before," Chris Kenyon, VP Sales & Business Development at Canonical told me. "This great working relationship means that we collaborate on specific features for each chipset ensuring that they are integrated into Ubuntu in time for product launch."

Kenyon added that Canonical has integrated platform specific features and have ensured they're functional within the 12.04 release. Those features include: updated VT-d extensions and large page support, enhancements to KVM adding additional support for APIC register virtualization and virtual-interrupt support, LTR Support (latency tolerance reporting), IDO (identification based ordering), and many more.

The E5 is a big deal in the server world as the first big release since the nehalem/westmere series. Linux is well positioned with multiple vendors to support the E5. For Canonical the stakes are especially high as they will likely be the first Enterprise Linux vendor to have a brand new distribution release with 12.04. Red Hat and SUSE are supporting the E5 on existing RHEL 6.x and SLES 11 platforms.





It will be interesting to see when Ubuntu 12.04 is live, how many tier1 hardware vendors Canonical is able to sign up and officially claim as certified platforms.





Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.