Red Hat Enterprise Linux Changelog

What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7

Jul 22, 2015

System Security:
Emphasizing the platform's commitment to stable and secure enterprise systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 helps prevent data leakage by allowing read-only mounting of removable media. In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 now includes the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Workbench, an easy-to-use tool that functions as a SCAP scanner and delivers tailored SCAP content functionality. SCAP Workbench, building upon existing SCAP functionality in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, allows customers to measure the compliance of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems against their own company-specific security guidelines and criteria.
Red Hat Access Insights:
To enhance the reliability of IT deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 is compatible with Red Hat Access Insights, a new hosted service from Red Hat designed to help customers proactively identify and resolve issues that could impact business operations. Leveraging the extensive knowledge of Red Hat Certified Engineers and Red Hat's award-winning customer support team, Red Hat Access Insights alerts IT administrators to potential problems, like configuration issues or vulnerabilities, and provides a dashboard to help identify, understand and correct these issues before any disruption occurs.
Linux Innovation:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 incorporates many of the latest, stable open source technologies, allowing enterprises to confidently deploy recent innovations across physical, virtual and cloud environments. One example is clufter, a tool for analyzing and transforming cluster configuration formats. Available as a technology preview, clufter enables system administrators to update existing high-availability configurations to run on the latest high-availability tools from Red Hat. LVM Cache is now a fully supported feature, allowing users to maximize the performance benefits of SSD-based storage for their business needs while limiting associated costs. Additionally, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 base image is now available via the Red Hat Customer Portal, enabling Red Hat customers to transform traditional workloads into container-based applications that are suitable for deployment on Red Hat certified container hosts, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and OpenShift Enterprise 3 by Red Hat.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 (Sep 16, 2014)

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 Beta (Jul 9, 2014)

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 (Oct 1, 2013)

New panic_on_io_nmi Kernel Option:
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 kernel includes a new panic_on_io_nmi option (configured via the /proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_io_nmi file). This option allows users to press the hardware or virtual Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI) button, which acts as an I/O error and triggers a crash where otherwise no crash would occur. This can be used in cases when the system is unresponsive and does not accept any commands.
Added kABI Symbols:
The following kABI symbols have been added to the kernel shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10:
unregister_lro_netdev
register_lro_netdev
libfc
libfcoe
These symbols allow Large Receive Offload to be disabled by the kernel stack.
Storage Drivers:
The cciss driver has been updated to the latest version, which adds support for Gen8 Snap IVB-EP servers with the new HP P430i 12GB Smart Array controller.
Miscellaneous drivers:
The ALSA HDA audio driver has been updated to support Creative Recon3D audio cards.
Subscription Management:
Updated Subscription Manager:
Red Hat Subscription Manager has been updated to the latest version, which includes the following notable enhancements:
When used against Subscription Asset Manager, Subscription Manager now prompts the user for the Organization if it is required to complete registration.
Subscription Manager now displays the number of subscriptions a user is attaching to a specific machine in the System Registration dialog.
The Subscription Manager GUI now shows the Organization ID in the System Facts dialog.
The Red Hat Certificate Tool (rct) now supports tab completion of its primary modules.
Subscription Manager now sets the ui_repoid_vars setting with all variables in a given content set. The ui_repoid_vars setting is used to display Yum variables, which are used in the baseurl, name, and other fields of a Yum repository file.
Subscription Manager can now be configured to not upload package profile data by setting the report_package_profile = 0 setting in the /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf file.
Enhanced Entitlements Reporting:
Red Hat Satellite now integrates with Subscription Asset Manager to provide a rich Enhanced Entitlements Reporting interface that maps your purchased products to systems registered within Satellite. The Red Hat Customer Portal now provides subscription manifests for Satellite 5-registered systems, which are imported into Subscription Asset Manager to provide the new reporting features. This manifest file contains information about the subscriptions available in the Satellite 5 entitlement certificate.
Subscription Asset Manager 1.3:
Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager is an on-premise subscription management application. It moves the administration of subscriptions and systems away from the Customer Portal and into the local infrastructure. Along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10, a new 1.3 version of Subscription Asset Manager is now available. For more information, refer to the Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager 1.3 Release Notes located at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Subscription_Asset_Manager/.
Red Hat Support Tool:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 includes a new package, redhat-support-tool, which provides the Red Hat Support Tool. This tool facilitates console-based access to Red Hat's subscriber services and gives Red Hat subscribers more venues for accessing both the content and services available to them as Red Hat customers. Further, it enables our customers to integrate and automate their helpdesk services with our subscription services. The capabilities of this package include:
Knowledge Base article and solution viewing from the console (formatted as man pages).
Viewing, creating, modifying, and commenting on customer cases from the console.
Attachment uploading directly to a customer case or to ftp://dropbox.redhat.com/ from the console.
Full proxy support (that is, FTP and HTTP proxies).
Easy listing and downloading of attachments to customer cases from the console.
Knowledge Base searching on query terms, log messages, and other parameters, and viewing search results in a selectable list.
Easy uploading of log files, text files, and other sources to the Shadowman automatic problem determination engine for diagnosis.
Various other support-related commands.
For more information about the Red Hat Support Tool, refer to the installed documentation in the /usr/share/doc/redhat-support-tool-version/ directory or the following Knowledge Base article: https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/445443.
Security:
Updated OpenSCAP:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 includes an updated version of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) configuration scanner, OpenSCAP. The new version provides important bug fixes and an authenticated scanner that implements the SCAP 1.2 specification.
File System:
Full Support for fsfreeze:
The fsfreeze command, provided by the util-linux package, is now fully supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10. fsfreeze suspends and resumes access to a file system. fsfreeze is intended to be used to temporarily suspend file system activity, allowing a consistent snapshot to be created. For more information, refer to the fsfreeze(8) man page.
General Updates:
MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.5:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 provides updated versions, specifically versions 5.1 and 5.5, of the MySQL packages as software collections. In order to migrate from MySQL 5.0 to 5.5, you must first update to MySQL 5.1. Note that the MySQL 5.1 packages are not supported and are provided only for the purposes of migration to MySQL 5.5. You should not use MySQL 5.1 on any of your production systems. For more information on the migration from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.5, refer to chapter Migrating from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.5 in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Deployment Guide at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/.
As a result of this update, Red Hat will not issue any more security advisories for the MySQL 5.0 packages (mysql-5.0.* and related packages). Security advisories will be provided only for MySQL 5.5.
New gcc-libraries Package:
A new gcc-libraries package, which includes the libitm library and a new libatomic library, is now included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, libitm was a separate package that included the libitm library. The libitm package is now deprecated and replaced by the gcc-libraries package.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 (Jan 8, 2013)

Support for Industry-Leading Hardware Vendors Through Enhanced Hardware Enablement. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 showcases the strong relationships Red Hat has with leading hardware vendors by including support for some of the latest CPU, chipset and device driver enhancements.
Continued Commitment to Security, Standards and Certifications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been built with security in mind – a commitment that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 helps solidify. This update features tighter security controls, the ability to verify and check the robustness of new passwords and support for the latest government password policy requirements. It also adds support for using Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode with dmraid root devices. FIPS mode now supports RAID device discovery, RAID set activation, and the creation, removal, rebuilding and displaying of properties.
New Developer Tools. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 includes several new developer-friendly features and tools, including the ability to develop and test with the latest version of open source Java available through OpenJDK 7. Many new SystemTap improvements have been added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, including compile-server and client support for IPv6 networks, smaller SystemTap files, faster compiles, and compile server support for multiple concurrent connections.
Enhanced Application Support. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 includes a new rsyslog5 package, which upgrades rsyslog to major version 5 and is faster and more reliable than existing rsyslog packages available in previous RHEL releases. Samba has also been updated to version 3.6 with several new features, including SMB2 support, a reworked print server and security default improvements for all versions.
New Virtualization Capabilities and Flexibility in Multi-vendor Environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 enhances the operating system's usability in multi-vendor environments by introducing Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for improved performance. This enhances the usability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for guests in heterogenous, multi-vendor virtualized environments and provides improved flexibility and interoperability for enterprises.
Better Subscription Management. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 uses Red Hat Subscription Management as the default, allowing customers to effectively and more easily manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions locally or with tools such as Subscription Asset Manager which was enhanced to easily run reports on subscription distribution and utilization and an improved user interface.