Red Hat Archive

"Red Hat, Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments. Designed to support today's flexible and varied enterprise architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers the comprehensive foundation customers need for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments."

A developer from the Qumranet team, developers of the KVM virtual machine and Spice Protocol has written about the team's experience in porting the RHEV-M software from C# to Java as a means of making the application cross platform and open sourcing it. The team considered several options including Mono which they discarded as too immature for the job, and Grasshopper technology was discarded as an option since the goal was to open source it and eventually settled on a semi-automated workflow using Java. Red Hat is well on its way towards the goal of making a cross-platform and open source management tool for managing virtual machines in the servers and desktops.

"As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat's new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers. You'd be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft's Windows Server. That's no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system. According to Red Hat, the plan is to have a Linux version ready by some point in 2010. But in the meantime, Red Hat customers who want to run the virtualization manager must purchase or already own a Windows server."

The fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family is released. From the press release: this version includes kernel-based virtual machine virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages. Other updates including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Also, support for technologies such as FCoE for storage environments and SR-IOV to improve virtual I/O performance and management included. On a side note, this article covers the upgrade procedure to RHEL v5.4 from the previous version.

"When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, many saw it as the real coming of age of Linux. While there is little doubt that IPO was a big event for Red Hat and Linux, perhaps an even more important one from a milestone point of view will officially occur this Friday. As of Friday, July 24, Red Hat will join the S&P 500 index."

Mark Cox, Red Hat's director of security response, has published his usual risk report, which includes very detailed statistics and other information on security issues and how they were handled in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Red Hat remains the only OS vendor to directly publish such information and provide the raw data as well. "Red Hat is continually developing technologies to help reduce the risk of security threats, and a number of these were consolidated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The most significant technologies were SELinux and Exec-Shield. Exec-Shield is a project which includes support for the No eXecute (NX) memory permission, simulating NX via segment limits, Position Independent Executables (PIE), gcc, and glibc hardening. For more details, a table of the major security technology innovations in Enterprise 4 is available."