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May 22, 2008

Today Red Hat released its second update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. As with earlier minor updates, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 comes with a larger set of bug fixes, updated hardware support capabilities, quality improvements and a set of new software features that have been backported from upstream open source projects to the Enterprise Linux 5 code base.

Some of the new features and capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 are primarily focused in six different areas:

Virtualization

Laptop and desktop improvements

Encryption and security

Cluster and storage enhancements

Networking and IPv6 enablement

Various serviceability features

Virtualization enhancements
Red Hat Linux Enterprise version 5.2 provides improved virtualization support for larger system and server configurations. This includes enhanced virtualization support for NUMA-based architectures. Also, physical CPU support has been increased to 64 CPUs per system, and memory support to 512 GB per system. These enable customers to implement large scale consolidations. Complementing this increased scalability, the number of network interfaces per guest is no longer limited to 3.

Libvirt, which has become the de-facto standard-base for hypervisor-agnostic Open Source virtualization management and was originally developed by Red Hat, continues to evolve rapidly and has seen significant improvements in RH Enterprise 5.2.

Red Hat also back-ported the CPU frequency scaling capability for the virtualization kernels from the upstream kernel. This provides reduced power consumption and improved virtualization performance and stability. Before Enterprise Linux 5.2, the company released new virtualization-aware, para-virtualized (PV) device drivers that can be used by a fully-virtualized guest instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 or a later host.

Fully-virtualized guests using the new PV drivers gain significant I/O performance improvement. PV drivers are available for x86 and x86-64 RHEL 3u9, 4.6, and 5.1 guests and later.

Laptop and desktop enhancements
On the desktop, one of the biggest change is a wholesale refresh of the primary Desktop applications:

Evolution 2.12.3

Firefox 3.0

Open Office 2.3

Thunderbird 2.0

Additionally, Red Hat has significantly improved laptop support, with Suspend/Hibernate/Resume enhancements that allow a user to certify more laptop systems. Many graphics drivers were also updated, including a backport of the Intel graphics driver commonly used in Desktop and Laptops.

Encryption and security enhancements
On the encryption and security side, RH has introduced new asynchronous kernel crypto hardware driver APIs into the upstream Linux kernel and back ported them into 5.2. This sets the foundation to allow the use of cryptographic hardware devices for kernel-based cryptography such as disk-encryption and IPSec. In an effort to improve security and to better comply with tightening corporate and governmental security standards, SHA-256 / SHA-512 was added as well as password encryption support and RFC4303 compliant auditing support.

For rsyslog Red Hat has added a new and improved logging facility that supports different logging-backends, live-analysis interfaces and tcp connections.

Cluster and storage improvements
Red Hat Cluster Suite, which is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform, now has a Resource Event Scripting Language that enables sophisticated application failover capabilities. It also newly supports SCSI-3 reservation fencing support for active/passive DM/MPIO (multipathing), which widens the range of storage devices that can be used in clusters.

Improved iSCSI support allows users to set-up diskless systems with a root volume on the iSCSI server, a common requirement in high-density Blade environments.

Networking and IPv6 enablement
In the networking segment, Red Hat has improved the general IPv6 compliance and SNMP IPv6 support, to the point that it believes Red Hat Enterprise Linux is in a leading position when it comes to IPv6 readiness. Also, with the newly added OpenSwan package, 5.2 now supports IKE 2 for IPv6 IPSec support. Support for the DHCPv6 client and server was also improved.

NFS received client support for servers with 64-bit inode numbers, while the OFED stack enabling Infiniband and RDMA was updated to the upstream version 1.3.

Serviceability
System Tap kernel tracing now is fully supported, while user-space tracing was added as Technology Preview, along with a couple of new and added improvements.

For additional information, please refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Release Notes, which can be found on www.redhat.com. The next Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor release will be 4.7 which is planned for release next month.

Source: Red Hat Inc.

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