RHEL 5.5 Beta preview

By Scott Gilbertson

Review Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5.5 has reached the beta stage with downloads available for those with a subscription to the Red Hat Network.

Typically, most news involving Red Hat's familiar, free Linux distro Fedora comes from the client software - such as GNOME updates and other desktop tools. But with the new RHEL, the big news lies with improvements to kernel-level software.

The RHEL 5.5 beta brings a slew of hardware improvements, including support of IBM's new Power7 chips, which are looking like a popular platform for Linux on embedded devices. This release also brings more driver support for external devices and run-time memory allocation for virtual machines.

For a complete list of everything new and improved in RHEL, you can check out the technical notes on the Red Hat website. But what really catches the eye is the work done on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM).

RHEL 5.4 brought full support for the KVM hypervisor, making KVMs the primary virtualization solution. RHEL 5.5 aims to continue that trend. Chief among the new features for KVMs in this release is the better memory management and improved device interactions. As of this release KVMs will be able to use any attached PCI devices as if they were attached directly to the guest OS, rather than running as virtualized devices.

More can be read here on theregister.co.uk: