Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta Supports New Intel Platforms

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced on February 10th the immediate availability of the first beta version of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 operating system. Besides the usual updates, improvements or bugfixes, this first development release of RHEL 5.5 is powered by a 2.6.18-186.EL5 kernel and it is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is in development and therefore the contents of the beta media kit, the implemented features, and the supported configurations are subject to change before the release of the final product. The supplied beta packages and CD and DVD images are intended for testing purposes only. Remember that this early access software is not supported and is not intended for production environments. Benchmark and performance results cannot be published based on this beta release without explicit approval from Red Hat." - the Red Hat developers said in the official release announcement.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5:

· Linux kernel 2.6.18-186.EL5;
· Anaconda enhancements;
· Kickstart improvements;
· Support for new hardware components (PMC Sierra MaxRAID Controller Adapters, Power6 Virtual FC devices, etc);
· KVM guests run-time memory allocation support;
· Improved PCI passthrough;
· Support for new Intel platforms (Boxboro-EX, Boxboro-MC);
· Support for new AMD platforms (Magny-Cours);
· Support for the Power 7 processor from IBM;
· New kernel features;
· New Kernel tracepoints;
· New device drivers (hpilo, i2c, mlx4);
· New drivers for network devices (iwlwifi, rt2x00, ath9k);
· New drivers for storage devices (qla2xxx, hptiop, lpfc, mpt2sas, mptque, megaraid_sas);
· Storage and filesystem management;
· Added GFS2 mount option;
· Updated CIFS;
· OpenOffice.org and Metacity updates;
· FreeRADIUS 2.0;
· Samba 3;
· Valgrind 3.5.0;
· and many more!

For a detailed list of all the changes brought by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta, please visit the official release notes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution is somehow targeted more to the commercial market, including mainframes, which enjoy a 7-year 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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service. In order to test this development release, Red Hat recommends that you do a clean install!