14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 has been made available for all its users and comes with a ton of updates that will provide a serious performance boost.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 is an operating system aimed at users who deal with large, complex IT projects, especially enterprises that require an open hybrid cloud, so this is quite an important upgrade.
The RHEL releases stick to a precise schedule and each new version is usually accompanied by big improvements to the system that go beyond package updates. This happens rather often and the changelogs are usually quite big.
What to expect from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6
"The kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 has been enhanced to enable user space to respond to certain SCSI Unit Attention conditions received from SCSI devices via the udev event mechanism. Because SCSI Unit Attention conditions are only reported in response to a SCSI command, no conditions are reported if no commands are actively being sent to the SCSI device."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 includes the Open vSwitch kernel module as an enabler for Red Hat's layered products. Open vSwitch is supported only in conjunction with products that contain the accompanying user-space utilities. Please note that without these required user-space utilities, Open vSwitch will not function and cannot be enabled for use," reads the official announcement.
According to the release notes, support has been implemented for IBM System z by adding the libhugetlbfs to the architecture (large pages are now possible in C and C++ programs), keywords are now available for the IPL device (ipldev) and console device (condev), the High Performance Networking (HPN) add-on has been removed as a separate product and it has been integrated in the main distro, and the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) implementation has been updated.
Also, a new package called scap-security-guide has been added and it will provide better security guidance, baselines, and associated validation mechanisms for SCAP, libica library APIs have been added for cryptographic modes, the system can now be used as a generation 2 virtual machine in the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 host, and UEFI firmware support has been added.
The complete release notes can be found in the official announcement. You can also review and purchase the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 distribution from Softpedia. Keep in mind that this is a commercial product and that you can't download and test it.