Posted on July 3, 2009 by by valerirojas

Good news for all Linux lovers,  Red Hat has just released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta (kernel-2.6.18-155.el5), with versions for x86, x86/64, Itanium, IBM POWER and System z. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release includes a variety of new features and capabilities, combined with enhancements in virtualization, storage/filesystem, security and developer tools.

Full details on the new features in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release here “release notes”.

Highlights:

Virtualization enhancements.

• KVM hypervisor
• Hardware support (SRIOV, IOMMU, VT-d):
  With this release Red Hat is introducing support for SRIOV (Single Root I/O for Virtualization). This feature aims to improve transaction throughput performance in virtual environments by taking advantage of PCI cards that can be shared by multiple virtual machines at one time without creating a throughput bottleneck. These throughput improvements combine with previous CPU and memory performance enhancements to allow customers to further consolidate workloads to lower their costs. SRIOV works with either IOMMU or VT-d in AMD and Intel platforms respectively.
• VDI SPICE protocol enablers:
  This software, unique to Red Hat, offers better response times for graphic/screen rendering by adaptively taking advantage of either client or host capabilities. This leads to better CPU utilization, enabling improved VDI consolidation ratios, without the need for expensive special hardware.
• Libvirt:
  perl interface for libvirt (new)
• kernel:
  Improved clock management when Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed on a VMware platform.

Storage / FileSystem

• New Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) utilities for management of FC instances on Ethernet
• Clustered Samba (Technology Preview)

Security

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is a FIPS-140 certification target

Developer/Sysadmin

• Kernel tracepoints (Technology Preview), coupled with tracepoint support in Systemtap. This release provides user-space backtrace support, complementing kernel-space backtracing that was provided in previous releases. Systemtap provides a powerful, comprehensive performance troubleshooting tool.
• New CIM support for DHCP services.

Find out more about it Red Hat News

Tweet