What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 Beta

Sep 2, 2015
  • Better processor allocation for tasks that require dedicated processor time. Modern systems have multiple processors and certain demanding workloads typically prioritize a dedicated processor at all times rather than efficiently sharing processor time with other applications and services. The introduction of on-demand vmstat workers in the kernel helps achieve more efficient CPU sharing and resource balancing.
  • The ability to remotely manage local disk data security based on network identity, making the task easier and more secure.
  • Enhancements to the storage management API (libStorageMgmt) now provide a vendor agnostic mechanism to query disk health and RAID configuration management.
  • The introduction of conntrack-tools for better network connection tracking
  • Enhancements to NetworkManager, facilitating better integration with external programs
  • A new web-based user interface for Performance Co-Pilot, aiding in the management and analysis of network and system performance
  • New tooling that aids in diagnostics and allows system administrators to easily gather key I/O metrics for device mapper devices.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 (Mar 6, 2015)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 offers improved development and deployment tools, enhanced interoperability and manageability, and additional security and performance features. As with all releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, these enhancements are delivered over a stable, secure, 10-year lifecycle backed by Red Hat’s award-winning global support.
  • Manageability and Interoperability:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers significant functionality improvements for heterogeneous operating system environments, particularly for infrastructure that uses Active Directory. By integrating the Common Internet File System (CIFS) with SSSD, users can now gain native access to Microsoft Windows file and print services without having to rely on winbind. Logical Volume Management (LVM) now includes additional OpenLMI-based hooks to manage volume groups and thinly provisioned volumes. This release also includes integrated client-side functionality to communicate with Ceph block storage.
  • Security and Access Management:
  • Improvements to Identity Management (IdM) now provide the ability to implement strong one-time password (OTP) authentication through LDAP and Kerberos using software tokens (e.g. FreeOTP) and hardware tokens from leading third-party vendors. Additionally, the IdM access control framework has been enhanced for better control over read/write permissions and a new Certificate Authority (CA) management tool streamlines changes to CA certificates and trust chains.
  • Development, Deployment and Performance:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers new developer tools, including several related to Linux containers. The latest docker package is now included along with orchestration tooling through Kubernetes; also available are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 base images, which provide certified, stable foundations upon which to build enterprise-grade containerized applications. Beyond containers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 also includes OpenJDK 8, the latest version of the open source Java SE 8 platform.
  • From a performance perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 supports higher processor and memory limits, as well as additional features to improve the performance of applications and virtual machines, especially those running memory-intensive workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 further enhances performance through the inclusion of an MCS locking mechanism to improve processor efficiency for large systems with sizable non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes.
  • Additional Red Hat Enterprise Linux Offerings:
  • Red Hat understands the needs of enterprise IT, from delivering applications faster through containerization to running time-sensitive workloads to gaining efficiency by standardizing across architectures. To better meet these requirements, the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 coincides with the launch of three specialized Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings designed to address industry use cases or specific architectures. These are...
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is also generally available today, using the tools and frameworks as delivered by Project Atomic. Created specifically with container-based workloads in mind, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host offers a minimal-footprint, streamlined platform perfect for running Linux containers in an enterprise environment.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time is Red Hat’s real-time computing platform for deadline-oriented and time-sensitive applications. Using a specialized version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 kernel that has been tuned to deliver consistent low-latency response times, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time retains the reliability, scalability, and performance of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 to enterprises using the IBM Power Systems platform with support for POWER8 on IBM Power Systems based on little endian. Running on POWER8 offers higher performance especially for big data applications through multi-threading, more cache and greater data bandwidth, while little endian mode removes an application portability barrier and allows datacenters running Power Systems to leverage Red Hat’s vast ecosystem of certified applications originally developed for x86 architecture. This also means that these certified applications can be more easily migrated between x86-based and POWER processor-based systems, giving customers the advantages of both architectures.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta (Dec 11, 2014)

  • In June, we announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, effectively raising the bar for enterprise IT infrastructure and pushing the operating system into the role of being a critical infrastructure platform for the enterprise. Featuring a broad spectrum of significant new features and enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to not only meet the demands of today’s modern datacenter but to tackle the next-generation IT requirements of tomorrow. From accelerating application delivery through containerization – to laying a stable foundation for the open hybrid cloud – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to redefine the enterprise operating system.
  • Today, we are pleased to build on the successful launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, which delivers a number of enhancements and improvements to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, with an emphasis on ease-of-use, improved manageability, security, and performance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta also introduces support for POWER8 on IBM Power Systems (based on little endian) hardware architecture and gives customers even more choice on application deployment platforms.
  • Ease-of-Use and Improved Manageability:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 streamlined system administration and system configuration through the introduction of OpenLMI – a unified management tooling and industry-standard management framework. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta enhances OpenLMI by adding new capabilities for managing storage and introducing support for thin provisioning in LVM (Logical Volume Manager). In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta makes it easy for system administrators to access Ceph block storage devices “out-of-the-box” thanks to the inclusion of Ceph userspace components and the Ceph RADOS Block Devices (RBD) kernel module. And, for environments where Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows live under the same roof, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta also includes improved interoperability through the integration of Common Internet File System (CIFS) with SSSD, providing native access to Microsoft Windows file and print services without relying on Winbind.
  • Security:
  • One of the most anticipated features of Identity Management (IdM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta is the ability to provide strong one-time password (OTP) authentication via LDAP and Kerberos protocols leveraging software tokens provided by FreeOTP (open source alternative to Google Authenticator) and hardware tokens provided by different vendors (like Yubico). The beta also introduces a new Certificate Authority (CA) management tool which makes it easy for customers using IdM to change a CA certificate and alter the trust chain.
  • Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta includes Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Security Guides which delivers both a written description of SCAP guidelines as well as a testing tool that automates the ability to evaluate compliance with security guidelines and pinpoint potential vulnerabilities on a given system. These SCAP Security Guides effectively reduce the complexity of ongoing compliance testing and enhance security assurance.
  • Additional Application Deployment Options:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 enhanced application development, delivery, portability and isolation through increased Linux containers functionality, including Docker, across physical, virtual and cloud deployments as well as development, test, and production environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta bolsters these capabilities by providing customers access to the latest Docker package (version 1.2) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform images available through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Extras channel and Red Hat Customer Portal, respectively.
  • Performance:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta builds on a host of “out-of-the-box” performance management features and capabilities, like tuned and performance profiles. In addition, new locking mechanisms have been implemented in the kernel that improve processor efficiency for large systems with sizable NUMA nodes.
  • Additional Offerings:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta provides access to new real-time technology for workloads that require very precise and deterministic processing times. This capability is delivered via enhancements to the Linux kernel and additional userspace packages that can be overlayed on top of a stock Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta installation.
  • Additionally, for customers who are using the IBM Power Systems platform as part of their datacenter infrastructure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta now includes support for POWER8 on IBM Power Systems (based on little endian). Running in little endian mode accelerates innovation on the Power platform by removing an application portability barrier and allowing customers utilizing IBM Power Systems to leverage the existing ecosystem of Linux applications as developed for the x86 architecture.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta (Aug 12, 2014)

  • Increased system performance
  • An improved system administration experience
  • Enhancements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual guest
  • Out-of-the-box support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to deliver low-latency, high bandwidth network connectivity.
  • A new socket polling implementation that reduces network latency and jitter.
  • Kernel locking improvements to allow for increased CPU utilization on large systems.
  • Support for additional 40GbE network adapters.
  • Full support for Load Balancer technology like haproxy and keepalived
  • Improved manageability of resource lists in large, high availability configurations
  • The addition of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a framework and set of services supporting system level performance monitoring and management in distributed environments

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 (Jun 10, 2014)

  • Red Hat further raises the bar for enterprise IT infrastructure - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 designed to meet both modern datacenter and next-generation IT requirements for cloud, Linux Containers, and big data
  • Now generally available, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 delivers a single platform for enterprises to realize the convergence of computing across the open hybrid cloud, from bare metal and virtual machines to the cloud
  • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the latest major release of the company’s flagship platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures, but it also pushes the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform. Built to meet modern datacenter demands along with next-generation IT requirements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 powers the spectrum of enterprise IT, from application containers to cloud services.
  • Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, and it has set industry standards for performance, capacity, and security. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a leading force in the enterprise datacenter and in the cloud. More than 90 percent of 2013 Fortune 500 companies, along with organizations in nearly every industry and around the globe, rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Bare metal servers, virtual machines, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are converging to form a robust, powerful datacenter environment to meet constantly changing business needs. Answering the heterogeneous realities of modern enterprise IT, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 offers a cohesive, unified foundation that enables customers to balance modern demands while reaping the benefits of computing innovation, like Linux Containers and big data, across physical systems, virtual machines and the cloud – the open hybrid cloud.
  • Addressing Next-Generation IT Requirements:
  • Enterprise IT does not exist in a static vacuum; technology is dynamic, with new innovations emerging almost daily, promising improved operational efficiencies as well as providing the ability to respond to radically-evolving business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 offers customers the agility and the flexibility to meet these new needs head-on without increasing complexity, from rapidly delivering new applications via secure, lightweight containers to scaling infrastructure to meet big data requirements with new and enhanced file systems.
  • Key Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 features to address next-generation IT needs include:
  • Enhanced application development, delivery, portability and isolation through Linux Containers, including Docker, across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments as well as development, test and production environments.
  • Significant file system improvements, including XFS as the default file system, scaling to 500 TB.
  • Cross-realm trust to easily enable secure access for Microsoft Active Directory users across Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux domains, providing the flexibility for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to co-exist within heterogeneous datacenters.
  • Powerful and secure application runtimes and development, delivery and troubleshooting tools, integrated into the platform and container-ready.
  • Managing the Modern Datacenter:
  • Beyond providing the capabilities to meet emerging IT innovation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 also addresses today’s technology needs. With growing requests for complex systems, on-demand services and robust security, IT teams need more control, more clarity and more scalability without having to deploy dozens of specialized tools. Independent of deployment scale, scope or complexity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 serves as not only a catalyst for enterprise innovation, but also delivers the military-grade security and the mission-critical reliability, as well as the performance, the features and the ease-of-use to efficiently “keep the lights on,”
  • Key features include:
  • Innovative infrastructure components like systemd, a leading standard for modernizing the management of processes, services, security and other resources.
  • Built-in performance profiles, tuning and instrumentation for optimized performance and easy scalability.
  • Unified management tooling and an industry-standard management framework with OpenLMI for streamlined administration and system configuration.
  • Enhanced application isolation and security applied via containerization to protect against both unintentional interference and malicious attacks.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ecosystem:
  • As with all of Red Hat’s enterprise open source solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is backed by Red Hat’s extensive global ecosystem of services and support. Read more about the global technology leaders that are rallying behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
  • Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will be supported by Red Hat’s robust hands-on training and certification program, featuring classroom, virtual and on-site team courses. More details about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 training and certification portfolio will be available soon.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 (Nov 21, 2013)

  • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 expands Red Hat’s vision of providing an enterprise platform that has the stability to free IT to take on major infrastructure challenges and the flexibility to handle future requirements, with an extensive partner and support ecosystem.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 is designed for those who build and manage large, complex IT projects, especially enterprises that require an open hybrid cloud. From security and networking to virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 provides the capabilities needed to manage these environments, such as tools that aid in quickly tuning the system to run SAP applications based on published best practices from SAP.
  • Securing the Next-Generation Enterprise:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 continues the push for integrated security functionality that combines ease-of-use and up-to-date security standards into the platform. The addition of a centralized certificate trust store enables standardized certificate access for security services. Also included are tools that meet leading security standards, including OpenSCAP 2.1, which implements the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) 1.2 standard. With these additions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides a secure platform upon which to build mission-critical services and applications.
  • Networking – When Every (Micro)Second Matters:
  • In the financial services and trading-related industries, application latency is measured in microseconds, not seconds. Now, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully supports sub-microsecond clock accuracy over the local area network (LAN) using the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Precision time synchronization is a key enabler for delivering better performance for high-speed, low latency applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 can now be used to track time on trading transactions, improving time stamp accuracy on archived data or precisely synchronizing time locally or globally.
  • Thanks to other networking enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, system administrators now have a more comprehensive view of network activity. These new capabilities enable sysadmins to inspect IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) data to list multicast router ports, multicast groups with active subscribers and their associated interfaces, all of which are important to many modern networking scenarios, including streaming media.
  • Virtualization Enhancements:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 continues Red Hat’s commitment to improving the overall virtualization experience and includes several improvements that make it a compelling choice for running in virtualized environments. Sysadmins can now dynamically enable or disable virtual processors (vCPUs) in active guests, making it an ideal choice for elastic workloads. The handling of memory intensive applications as Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests has also been improved, with configurations supported for up to 4TB of memory on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
  • The KVM hypervisor also integrates with GlusterFS volumes to provide direct access to the distributed storage platform, improving performance when accessing Red Hat Storage or GlusterFS volumes. Finally, guest drivers have been updated to improve performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 running as a guest on supported third-party hypervisors.
  • Evolving Ease-of-Use, Storage, and More:
  • As application deployment options grow, portability becomes increasingly important. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 enables customers to deploy application images in containers created using Docker in their environment of choice: physical, virtual, or cloud. Docker is an open source project to package and run lightweight, self-sufficient containers; containers save developers time by eliminating integration and infrastructure design tasks.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 stays current with the advancements in Solid-State Drive (SSD) controller interface, introducing support for NVM Express (NVMe)-based SSDs. The NVMe specification aims to standardize the interface for PCIe-based SSDs and its inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 positions the platform to support an expanding range of future NVMe-based devices.
  • Improvements have also been added to improve enterprise storage scalability within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. It is now possible to configure more than 255 LUNs connected to a single iSCSI target. In addition, control and recovery from SAN for iSCSI and Fibre Channel has been enhanced, and updates to the kexec/kdump mechanism now make it possible to create debug (dump) files on systems configured with very large memory (e.g. 6TB).
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 makes it easier to track and manage subscription consumption across the enterprise, integrating subscription tracking into existing business workflow. Usability enhancements include support for remote access to Windows clients and servers that use a newer version of the RDP protocol, including Windows 7 and 8 desktops and Windows Server 2012

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 Beta (Oct 8, 2013)

  • Today, we are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. To keep pace with the demand for enterprise-class infrastructure, the newest version of the leading Linux platform extends its scalability and manageability to aid in the build-out and control of large, complex IT environments. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 will be designed to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications by automating the optimal configuration of common SAP deployments. The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also offers enhancements and new capabilities in key areas such as:
  • Subscription Management Services;
  • Scalability;
  • Networking;
  • Storage;
  • Virtualization; and
  • Security.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux seamlessly integrates with Red Hat subscription management services to manage the local system and its allocated subscriptions. The Subscription Manager agent connects the system to the Red Hat Customer Portal or to an on-premise subscription management service set-up by the customer using Subscription Asset Manager. Once connected, the customer can realize centralized control of their subscription assets and manage inventory, status, and gain enhanced reporting for support multiple systems.
  • Scalability at the administrative level is increased by changes made to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 beta kernel. Kernel dump files on large systems can now scale to multiple terabytes of data, and a new compression algorithm (LZO) speeds the creation of dump files, leading to reduced down time during crash dump generation and faster troubleshooting. An enhancement to the perf tool’s tracing and testing commands also provides additional infrastructure event monitoring capabilities.
  • Networking enhancements new with the beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 range from improved performance to expanded compliance with industry-specific requirements. These new capabilities include:
  • Better analysis of multicast traffic by inspecting Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) data to list router ports and groups with active subscribers;
  • Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) association statistics in support of SS7 M3UA (Message Transfer Part Level 3 User Adaptation Layer) implementations provide additional monitoring capabilities for customers within the telecommunications sector; and
  • IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol Version 2 (PTPv2), used for precisely synchronizing clocks in an Ethernet network. PTPv2 is capable of achieving clock accuracy in the sub-microsecond range and supports network driver time stamping for many of the widely adopted network drivers.
  • The storage additions to the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 deliver improved scalability, performance, and ease of use. Enterprise storage customers benefit from improved control and recovery in iSCSI and Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. The performance and high-availability features of Multipath IO are available to a broader set of devices and multipath device automatic naming enhancements provide shorter, more convenient device names. The beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also supports Intel's NVM Express driver, the industry standard specification for accessing PCI Express bus-based SSDs. In addition, FUSE-based file systems, like GlusterFS, can now use asynchronous IO for improved performance.
  • The beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 continues to deliver virtualization to provide for a robust guest environment. The Red Hat guest can serve as a client to the highly scalable Gluster filesystem and Red Hat Storage. The path to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is streamlined by utilities that convert VMware OVF and Citrix Xen guests to Red Hat guests, helping customers to simplify their complex and diverse virtual infrastructure onto Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology. The maximum memory for Red Hat guests has increased to four terabytes, allowing guests to run large-scale workloads, and dynamic hot-add functionality for virtual CPUs enables customers to add compute resources to installed guests on-the-fly, reducing downtime.
  • Security enhancements keep the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 up-to-date with essential government and industry regulations as well as emerging best practices. NSS, GnuTLS, OpenSSL and Java can now share a single, system-wide static data store, which can be used by crypto-toolkits as input for trusted certificate decisions, something that is required by many corporate deployments. Additional security capabilities include:
  • Support for smartcard authentication by providing single-sign-on capabilities across more application subsystems;
  • The latest version of OpenSCAP, an authenticated scanner that meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) SCAP 1.2 certification requirements; and
  • Support for the latest Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2) standard, allowing secure network communication.
  • The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also features several desktop and graphical enhancements. Users can now remotely operate Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktops and Windows Server 2012 consoles using the RDP protocol, and customers running the Evolution mail client will now experience better integration with Microsoft Exchange, especially from a calendaring perspective. Additionally, the base LibreOffice software is updated to 4.0, which provides a host of office workflow improvements.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Beta (Dec 5, 2012)

  • Identity Management:
  • System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) enhancements improve the interoperability experience with [Microsoft Active Directory] by providing centralized identity access control for Linux/Unix clients in a heterogeneous environment.
  • File system:
  • pNFS (Parallel NFS) client (file layout only) remains in technology preview, however now delivers performance improvements with the addition of Direct I/O for faster data access. This drives particular performance benefits for I/O intensive use cases including database workloads.
  • Virtualization:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now includes the Microsoft Hyper-V Linux drivers, which were recently accepted by the upstream Linux community, improving the overall performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V.
  • Installation support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V para-virtualization drivers. This new feature enhances the user deployment experience of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest in either of these virtualization environments.
  • In this release, KVM virtualization virtio-scsi support, a new industry storage architecture, provides industry leading storage stack scalability.
  • Management:
  • The use of swap functionality over NFS enables more efficient read/write tradeoffs between local system memory and remote disks. This capability increases performance in very large, disk-less server farms seen in ISP and Web hosting environments.
  • Enhancement in c-groups delivers the ability to migrate multi-threaded applications without errors.
  • Optimized perf tool for the latest Intel processors
  • Storage:
  • New system log features identify mapping from block device name to physical device identifier – allowing an administrator to easily locate specific devices as needed.
  • Productivity Tools:
  • Microsoft interoperability improvements with Microsoft Exchange and calendar support in Evolution. Productivity functions, such as calendar support with alarm notification and meeting scheduling is improved.
  • Customers such as animation studios and graphic design houses now have support for the newer Wacom tablets.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 (Dec 7, 2011)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 delivers significant improvements in virtualization, resource management and high availability, and offers new features in storage and file system performance and identity management. The key benefits for organizations employing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 are higher levels of efficiency realized through resource management and performance optimization, along with enhanced business agility through additional security and flexibility for virtualized and clustered deployments.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2 (Jun 30, 2010)

  • Customer and partner testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is in full swing, and we have been very pleased with the strong positive feedback that we have received from our testing community. We are on track to deliver a final product that we expect will meet customer needs for years to come. The first Beta was released in April, and incorporated a wide range of new and upgraded features. Today we have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2, which provides an updated installer, additional new technologies and resolutions to many of the issues that were reported in the initial Beta.
  • As we move through the Beta process, we will continue to integrate corrections and suggestions identified by our internal testing groups, customers, partners and community members. Today’s Beta 2 offers the Red Hat Enterprise Linux community the opportunity to take a deeper dive into the features and technologies that we expect to provide in the final release.
  • We are asking customers and partners who are testing the initial Beta to install and continue their testing with Beta 2. This will help us to deliver the best possible final product. Beta 2 also provides an excellent starting point for new testers. Depending on testing and feature requirements, an additional Beta may be released in the coming weeks.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta (Apr 21, 2010)

  • Power management: tickless kernel and improvements through the application stack to reduce wakeups, power consumption measurement by Powertop, Power Management (ASPM, ALPM), and adaptive system tuning by Tuned, all enhance more efficient system power usage.
  • Next generation networking: comprehensive IPv6 support (NFS 4, CIFS, mobile support [RFC 3775], ISATAP support), FCoE, iSCSI, and a new and improved mac 802.11 wireless stack.
  • Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS): system-level enhancements from industry collaborations make the most of hardware RAS capabilities and NUMA architectures.
  • Fine-grained control and management: improved scheduler and better resource management in the kernel via Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) and Control Groups (CG).
  • Scalable filesystems: ext4 file system provides support for larger file sizes and significantly reduces repair times over ext3. XFS® is a high-performance file system that supports extremely large files and is optimized for large data transfers.
  • Virtualization: KVM includes performance improvements and new features, sVirt protects the guest and host from unauthorized access, SR-IOV and NPIV deliver high-performance virtual use of physical devices, and libvirt leverages kernel resource management functionality.
  • Enterprise security enhancement: SELinux includes improved ease of use, application sandboxing, and significantly increased coverage of system services, while SSSD provides unified access to identity and authentication services as well as caching for off-line use.
  • Development and runtime support: SystemTap improvements, ABRT is a new framework for simple collection and reporting of bug information, and improvements are made to GCC (version 4.4.3), glibc (version 2.11.1), and GDB (version 7.0.1).

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 (Mar 31, 2010)

  • Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5:
  • Virtualization is provided in all Red Hat Enterprise Linux server products and is optionally available for desktop products
  • Storage and extended server virtualization are provided with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Red Hat Network supports virtualized guest operating systems
  • virt-manager, libvirt/virsh management tools are available for single system or scripted virtualization management
  • Integration with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is available for enterprise virtualization management
  • Kernel and performance:
  • Currently in update 4
  • Based on the Linux 2.6.18 kernel
  • Optimized for multi-core processors
  • Continued hardware support for maximum flexibility
  • Development and performance tools, including SystemTap
  • advanced I/O performance and virtualization technologies, such as SRIOV
  • Large SMP support for both physical and virtual systems
  • IPv4/IPv6 fragmentation offload and buffer management
  • Dynamically switchable per-queue I/O schedulers
  • Kernel buffer splice capability for improved I/O buffer operations
  • Packaging
  • Servers:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • View server comparison chart
  • Desktops:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop
  • View desktop comparison chart
  • Security:
  • SELinux enhancements include Multi-Level Security and targeted policies for all services
  • SEtroubleshooter GUI simplifies SELinux management
  • Integrated directory and security capabilities
  • IPSEC enhancements improve security and performance
  • ExecShield enhancements, such as a call frame Canary word, strengthen hacker defenses
  • New Audit features provide powerful new search/reporting and real-time monitoring
  • Networking & interoperability:
  • Network storage enhancements include Autofs, FS-Cache, and iSCSI support
  • IPv6 support and conformance enhancements
  • Improved Microsoft® file/print and Active Directory integration, including support for Windows
  • Desktop:
  • Desktop enhancements include updated configuration tools, applications, and laptop support
  • Foundational Stateless Linux features (X autoconfigure, NetworkManager, etc.)
  • Improved ACPI support with features such as suspend to disk
  • Smart card login - with PKI/Kerberos authentication
  • Integrated multimedia support
  • Enhanced plug and play hardware support (cameras, printers, scanners, etc.)
  • Network Manager provides automatic wired and wireless network configuration
  • Enhanced graphics using AIGLX/Compiz (with fading, transparency, etc.)
  • Development environment:
  • Enhanced application development tools including SystemTap profiler and Frysk debugger
  • GCC 4.1 and glibc 2.5 toolchain
  • Storage:
  • Support for root device multipath IO (MPIO) improves availability
  • Single system/guest version of Red Hat Global File System included in the base server product
  • Block device data encryption support
  • Management:
  • Numerous installer improvements make system configuration simpler
  • Yum/Pup-based updater for Red Hat Network
  • Conga cluster and storage management (with Advanced Platform)
  • Integrated support with Satellite server

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (Sep 3, 2009)

  • Hardware:
  • 10 GigE drivers with GRO support
  • FCoE support on standard NICs
  • SR I/OV support
  • System:
  • Kernel tracepoints for systemtap use
  • Per process I/O accounting
  • FIEMAP support
  • Virtualization:
  • Hypervisor scalability to 192 cpus
  • Additional hypervisor
  • Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM)

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (Jan 20, 2009)

  • Red Hat, Inc. today announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, featuring the latest open source, commercial-strength technology innovations. In the third update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support and incorporation of OpenJDK Java technologies. Customers with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription will receive the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 update, which is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Beta (Oct 29, 2008)

  • Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the beta release of 5.3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family of products. This beta release includes the following improvements: support for up to 126 CPUs in the x86_64 Hypervisor; support for up to 1 TB memory per host on x86_64; cluster mirror support (2-leg mirrors only); NetworkManager 0.7; updated graphics drivers; re-based CUPS (print server), now with full Kerberos support; initial implementation of userspace tracing; root and swap encryption support in the installer; hibernate / resume support with encrypted disks; SELinux enablement of new NetworkManager and audit functionality; re-based samba from 3.0.28 to 3.0.32 which supports Windows Vista....