RHEL 5.9 Beta includes Microsoft's Hyper-V driver

With the recently released beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.9, Red Hat has integrated the drivers for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation technology, which have been developed as part of the Linux kernel, into RHEL5. The beta of the upcoming RHEL5 release includes a series 5 version of the rsyslog utility that users can switch to by installing a new rsyslog5 package. The Samba3x packages now include Samba 3.6.

The RHEL 5.9 Beta, available to Red Hat subscribers through the company's customer portal, also offers the Java 7 runtime environments from IBM, OpenJDK and Oracle. As usual, Red Hat has updated numerous drivers to improve the distribution's support for recently introduced and soon-to-be-released hardware components. Further details about these and other new features can be found in Red Hat's news announcement and in the release and technical notes.

RHEL 5.9 will be the last release in first production phase of the RHEL5 life cycle, which ends in December of this year. The next support phase of the operating system, which was introduced five-and-a-half years ago, will span 2 years. During this time, the RHEL developers will make very few major changes; new hardware support will only be integrated if it can be added without requiring major restructuring work. In the third phase that follows, there will no longer be any minor releases, and corrections will be made via the package repositories only; this phase will end in March 2017. By then, RHEL8 should be one to two years old if Red Hat keeps to its current release rhythm; RHEL7 is planned for next year.

(crve)