Red Hat upgrades its Linux platform

CHICAGO, US: Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of the fourth update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform, providing the delivery of technology enhancements to customers via the company's subscription model.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions and delivers expanded virtualization capabilities with the inclusion of kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology and Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) and PCI-SIG SR-IOV.

It allows multiple virtual machines in an Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series-based platform to directly share I/O devices.

While continuing to deliver a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software to customers, the release also features improved I/O throughput and the inclusion of additional tools for developers, said a press release.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays a significant role in Red Hat's virtualization strategy, and the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 with the same virtualization technology base as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization today is a significant step in our delivery of virtualization to the market,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat.

He added, “The release also features advances in performance, security and storage that span virtual and physical environments. With this update release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux aims to raise the bar once again, offering compelling software technologies with impressive quality and reliability.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5., in combination with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products, is intended to enhance Red Hat's position in open virtualization as being the first Virtual Machine Vendor to support both Intel VT-d and PCI-SIG SR-IOV, allowing customers to deploy virtualization pervasively, said the release.

It also includes several key feature enhancements targeted at application developers and system administrators.

Key to these features is enhancement to the Systemtap performance monitoring toolset, including support for profiling and monitoring C++ applications, as well as inclusion of a large number of static kernel tracepoints to simplify performance observation for the highest profile kernel subsystems.

Providing a roadmap to future enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 includes a preview implementation of the highly used malloc memory allocation library, which is tuned for the latest, anticipated generation of multicore processors, added the release.