14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, the latest update to the solid 5.x branch, has been released. After a couple of months in beta, it is available for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 subscribers. As with all minor updates, the focus is on bug fixes and stability, but there are several new features as well.
Improvements to Xen virtualization should be noted since Red Hat has deprecated the Xen hypervisor in favor of the newer KVM, in RHEL 6.
"Red Hat today announced the general availability of the seventh update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7," Red Hat announced.
"This release is important for our customers who wish to remain on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 while gaining some of the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6," it said.
One of the more important additions is support for SCAP, which stands for Security Content Automation Protocol, implemented via OpenSCAP.
The technology was first introduced in Fedora 14 and has now made it into Red Hat's 5.x branch.
The tool should make it easier for administrators to verify the security levels of their Red Hat installs.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 also adds support for the Subscription Manager which was first introduced in RHEL 6.0.
The new tool makes subscription management easier, for Red Hat at least, by assigning a subscription to a specific machine.
RHEL 5.7 brings improvements to the Xen virtualization technology. Performance of Xen guests should be improved on 32-bit environments.
Users can now assign 256 disks to virtualized machines rather than 100 as before. Guest boot up time has also been improved.
KVM hasn't been overlooked, there are some updates for the newer virtualization technology as well, like better CD-ROM emulation, and fixes for the boot up order of virtual machines.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service.