Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Beta released

A week after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1, Red Hat has announced the availability of a beta version of RHEL 5.7. The RHEL5 family is still in the first RHEL life cycle phase and as such, 5.7 will contain revised drivers, new features and optimised components, in addition to all of the security fixes that have accumulated over the past few months.

Red Hat says it has improved the speed of host switching for live migration with KVM. In Xen virtualisation on 32-bit hosts, there are a number of speed improvements; guest systems now boot faster and can address up to 256 disks instead of the previous limit of 100.

New enterprise features include Subscription Manager – which has already been integrated into RHEL 6.1 – and OpenSCAP security reporting. New and revised drivers promise improved support for modern network chips, especially those for 10-gigabit Ethernet. Also included are new and improved drivers for Fibre Channel adapters and SAS chips. Red Hat says it has improved support for new processors and chipsets from AMD, Intel and IBM.

RHEL subscribers will receive the beta version via the Red Hat Network. For further details on the changes, see a post on the Red Hat blog and the release notes. At this rate, it is likely that RHEL 5.7 will be released in either mid-July or at the end of July, roughly 6 months after the release of RHEL 5.6. Red Hat is working to keep up this pace with the aim of reducing the gap between minor RHEL releases, as Jim Totton, Vice President of Platform Business Unit at Red Hat, recently stated at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2011 in a conversation with The H's associates at heise Open.

(crve)