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Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5.5 has reached the beta stage with downloads available for those that have a Red Hat Network subscription. For those that prefer the free (as in beer) CentOS (essentially RHEL without support) you can <a href="http://people.redhat.com/jwilson/el5/">download the new kernel</a> separately and upgrade your CentOS installation.
Indeed, whereas most of the news in a Fedora release -- Red Hat's more familiar, free Linux distro -- is typically in client software, like GNOME updates and other desktop tools, the big news in the new RHEL is improvements to kernel-level software.
RHEL 5.5 beta brings slew of hardware improvements, including support of IBM's new Power7 chips, which are looking like a popular platform for Linux on embedded devices. This release also brings more driver support for external devices and run-time memory allocation for virtual machines; but the biggest news in this incremental update to RHEL 5.5 is the continuing improvements to kernel virtual machines (KVM).
RHEL 5.4 brought full support for the KVM hypervisor, making KVMs the primary virtualization solution, and RHEL 5.5 aims to continue that trend.
Chief among the new features for KVMs in this release is the better memory management and improved device interactions. As of this release KVMs will be able to use any attached PCI devices as if they were attached directly to the guest OS, rather than running as virtualized devices.
On some hardware, notably Intel machines running VT-d extensions, PCI devices can be swapped and reassigned while a virtual system is running.
RHEL 5.5 also allows you to reallocate memory while a virtual machine is running so there's no need to shut down your servers or guest OSes just to increase or decrease the allocated RAM.
Samba also sees some love in RHEL 5.5 with improvements that should make working with Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server a bit smoother.
As with many features in RHEL, if you've been using recent releases of Fedora many of the latest features in RHEL may be familiar. For example recent improvements and many much-needed bug fixes to the Anaconda system installer are also now available in RHEL 5.5.
While RHEL is probably most familiar in server setups, the desktop workstation has been updated as well with the latest version of the GNOME desktop and all usual accompaniments, including the latest version of OpenOffice.org, with support for (for better or worse) Microsoft's Office 2007 OOXML file formats.
Those that do use RHEL on the desktop will be happy to hear that WIFi support is a big part of the coming 5.5 release. There's support for Ralink rt2 drivers, as well as drivers for Intel wifi cards and the Atheros ath9k driver for the latest chips.
For those of you who don't manage datacenters worth of RHEL server, and don't want to spend the big money on an admittedly well supported desktop version, the big news in any Red Hat release is likely CentOS, the free version of RHEL (technically, as the website puts it, CentOS is based on a "prominent North American Enterprise Linux").
We took RHEL 5.5 beta for spin and found it to be, well, quite nice. It was our first exposure to RHEL directly though we are familiar with CentOS, and indeed, aside from the prominent Red Hat branding, things looked and behaved much like CentOS.
Of course CentOS isn't the only auxiliary RHEL distro (though it is the most popular), others that will eventually benefit from this release include Scientific Linux and Oracle's Enterprise Linux (which, like RHEL, is not free as in beer).
If you'd like to upgrade CentOS or others now, as mentioned above, you can at least grab the kernel, though you'll have to wait for some of the other new tools. For a complete list of everything new and improved in RHEL, check out the <a href="http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.5.b1/html/Technical_Notes/">technical notes</a> on the Red Hat website. When exactly the new features in RHEL 5.5 will move downstream to CentOS and others remains up to each project.
The current beta release of RHEL 5.5 is available to members of the Red Hat Network for testing. The beta test phase is scheduled to run through March 16, 2010, and while no final release date has been set, we expect RHEL 5.5 to be available near the end of March.
Overall the latest beta is solid update for RHEL. The new KVM tools and additional device support will make RHEL 5.5 well worth the upgrade when the final release arrives later this year.
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