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Shanti tested memcache a second time: With the same hardware but a different operating system:

The system running OpenSolaris and memcached 1.3.2 gave us a maximum throughput of 350K ops/sec as previously reported. The same system running RHEL5 (with kernel 2.6.29) and the same version of memcached resulted in 280K ops/sec. OpenSolaris outperforms Linux by 25% !

Jim Laurent worte an nice comparisiion of the EAL 4+ evaluation targets between RHEL 5 and Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions. It look like, that IBM/Red Hat leaved out most of the difficult parts. Perhaps out of technical reasons, perhaps to be a few month faster for a marketing stunt at the price of having an meaningless certification, as it excludes many standard parts of a modern Linux implementation (no desktop, no swapable disks, no networked trusted printing, but it read your self).

After the LSPP EAL4+ evaluation of RHEL5 you should read this article to get an in-depth view to the matter. The articleComparing the Multilevel Security Policies of the Solaris Trusted Extensions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Systems ends with:

RHEL5 LSPP and Trusted Extensions have taken different design approaches to meet the same CC profiles. However, while these systems might meet the same criteria, it is important to consider the functionality that is included in the systems submitted for LSPP evaluation. Trusted Extensions includes several features, such as multilevel NFS and a multilevel windowing system, that are designed to meet the security data flow requirements specified by LSPP and to be usable in real-world environments and by real-world customers. Comparable features are either not available or have been excluded from the RHEL5 LSPP evaluation target.

It´s quite interesting, how different two system with the same EAL level and the same protection profile can be.