Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Can Put All Your 192 Processors to Work

Red Hat announced yesterday that its flagship business-oriented Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, received an update, raising its version number to 5.4. "Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, release 5.4 [...] New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is a reorganization of the release note material. Now the Release Notes are a condensed set of major release highlights. The Technical Notes contain the majority of the information regarding new feature descriptions and bug change notices."

This operating system is available for the following architectures: x86, AMD64/Intel 64, Itanium Processor Family, Power Systems and IBM's System z for the Advanced Platform and Server editions, and x86, AMD64/Intel 64 platforms for the Desktop edition.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 sports the 2.6.18-164 Linux kernel and brings support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet with optimized Ethernet header comparison support, Fibre Channel over Ethernet for the standard network cards and Single Root Input/Output Virtualization support. The custom kernel features tracepoints that can be used with the systemtap utility, per process I/O accounting and FIEMAP (the extent mapping ioctl call) support.

On the virtualization side, you can now use the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) alongside Xen. If you just happen to have 192 processors lying around and you want to virtualize servers on them, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 has gotten all of them covered, and it even has a bonus feature for your enormous data center's efficiency: it now supports 1GB hugepages, drastically reducing the page table's size.

Other updates include GCC 4.4, a new malloc() function, filesystem support for clustered, high-availability storage, included to add Microsoft Windows storage support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

You can find out more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 or download the installation images right now from Softpedia.