14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat has just announced a distribution release. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.5 is the fifth update among the RHEL 4 series and comes with many additions and enhancements that make this distro more stable and reliable. A lot of improvements, bug fixes and updates were made especially on the kernel side, here 2.6.9-55 EL, which includes, among others, updated kernel support for Infiniband and RHEL4 paravirtualizes kernel for i686 and x86-64 respectively installation of paravirt RHEL 4.5 guests.
Highlights:
- NFS performance metrics - EDAC for Opteron - CIFS updated to 1.45 - clustering application support through dm device ioctls - diskdump support for some drivers
Regarding the hardware support enhancements, there are some updates and added new drivers that could be counted, such as the ppc host ethernet adapter device driver or AMD quad-core systems. RHEL 4.5 also comes with support for the native SAS and STAT devices, Alsa support for the Broadwater platforms and many others of this kind as well as many other significant new added features like the possibility of configuring the location for the core dumps in the netdump-server or a preview release of OpenOffice.org 2.0.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for short) distribution is somehow targeted more to the commercial market, including mainframes which enjoy a 7 years support on Red Hat's behalf after its release. New versions of RHEL are released quite fast and thus, users can upgrade their current version to the newest release free of charge. Red hat distributed four versions of RHEL: RHEL AS (Advanced Server), RHEL ES (edge, economy or entry-level server), RHEL WS (workstation) and Red Hat Desktop.