Linux Solutions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5.2 was released yesterday with six areas that have been given a major overhaul; Desktop, Security, Virtualization, clustering and storage, networking and Ipv6 and serviceability.

Not only that there is now broader hardware and architecture support. In particular, RHEL v5.2 provides enhanced capabilities for x86/x86-64, Itanium, IBM POWER and S/390 architectures. These improvements are mainly in the performance, power usage, scalability and manageability. For example, Red Hat claims that RHEL will support Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration.

RHEL v5.2 can support virtualization on systems with up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of memory per CPU. Virtualization support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is also included. The new virtualization features also include virtualization-aware, PV (para-virtualized) device drivers. This gives the VM more direct access to the hardware, which in turn gives improved I/O performance.

This can only be used by guest instances of RHEL on the x86 and x86-64 architectures. Still, on these systems, if Red Hat is correct, administrators will see better overall throughput. To manage all this, RHEL 5.2 uses an improved version of Libvirt, a Red Hat-sponsored open source hypervisor-agnostic virtualization management framework.

Besides including newer versions of common desktop applications like Evolution 2.12.3 for email and groupware, Firefox 3 for Web browsing and OpenOffice 2.3 for office work, Red Hat has also added Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements for laptops. Finally, Red Hat has updated many of its graphic drivers.

For better security, Red Hat has backported the new asynchronous kernel crypto hardware driver APIs from the upstream 2.6.22 Linux kernel into RHEL 5.2’s 2.6.18 kernel. This will enable developers to create drivers for cryptographic hardware devices. Red Hat has also added SHA-256/SHA-512 password encryption support and RFC4303 compliant auditing support.

On the clustering and storage front, Red Hat Cluster Suite, which comes with the RHEL 5 Advanced Platform, now has a Resource Event Scripting Language. RHEL 5.2 also has better iSCSI support for storage area networks (SANs).

In networking, Red Hat claims it has greatly improved its IPv6 support. In particular, RHEL 5.2 now supports OpenSwan 5.2. This means users will be able to run IPv6 IPSec virtual private networks (VPNs).

Last, but not least, RHEL v5.2 also fully supports SystemTap kernel tracing for developers. SystemTap user-space tracing is also available but only as a technology preview. In addition, all earlier individual software fixes have been consolidated into the RHEL 5.2 release.

RHEL v5.2 became available on May 21st. Red Hat Network subscription owners will automatically get this update.