The introduction of the tickless kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (refer to Section 12.4.2, “Tickless Kernel”) allows the CPU to enter the idle state more frequently, reducing power consumption and improving power management. The new powertop tool provides the ability to identify specific components of kernel and userspace applications that frequently wake up the CPU. powertop was used in development to identify and tune many applications in this release, reducing unnecessary CPU wake up by a factor of 10.

tuned is a system tuning daemon that monitors system components and dynamically tunes system settings. Utilizing ktune (the static mechanism for system tuning), tuned can monitor and tune devices (e.g. hard disk drives and ethernet devices). Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 also introduces diskdevstat for monitoring disk operations and netdevstat for monitoring network operations.