The developers have made some important changes to the operating system

Aug 13, 2014 07:11 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta for all customers, and it brings some performance improvements and various other changes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 is not designed for the average user and in fact it's developed for people who build and manage large, complex IT projects, especially enterprises that require an open hybrid cloud.

The RHEL releases are still few and far between. For example, the previous version in this branch of Red Hat Linux was launched back in October 2013. Needless to say that numerous things have changed since then, although Red Hat is not a company that tries to integrate the latest technologies, only the most stable and proven.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers a stable, proven and predictable platform, balancing the enterprise need to maintain a reliable and secure platform for mission critical workloads with the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.”

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta answers this need, providing enhanced functionality that allows organizations to easily build and manage large, complex IT infrastructure for deployment across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta delivers a variety of improvements that provide increased system performance across physical, virtual, and cloud environments,” reads the official announcement.

According to the release notes, the system performance has been increased, a better system administration experience is now provided, various enhancements have been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual guest, out-of-the-box support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to deliver low-latency, high bandwidth network connectivity, a new socket polling implementation that reduces network latency and jitter has been added, and support for additional 40GbE network adapters has been added.

Also, a few kernel locking improvements have been implemented to allow for increased CPU utilization on large systems, full support has been added for the Load Balancer technology like haproxy and keepalived, the manageability of resource lists in large, high availability configurations has been improved, and the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) has been added (a framework and set of services supporting system level performance monitoring and management in distributed environments).

Users will also notice that support has been added for a host to feed randomness to a virtual machine, the security for cryptographic applications has been improved, and multi-queue performance improvements for guest network and storage have been made.

The complete release notes can be found in the official announcement. You can also review and purchase the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta distribution from Softpedia.