Red Hat announces beta for RHEL 5.8

Red Hat has announced a beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8. The beta brings enhancements to installation, security and virtualisation to the distribution.

For operations, the update will add support for power management quality of service which will allow data centre administrators to move between power saving and high-performance modes depending on demand. Easier IP over Infiniband adapter configuration at install time is also promised. Iotop has been added to enable the monitoring of I/O resources at a process level and PCI-e 3.0 support has now been enabled. There has also been a number of network and storage driver enhancements which have increased the number of supported devices.

Virtualisation enhancements see support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.0 and RHEL 6.2 added to the spice-client package allowing users to access their virtual machines over a WAN connection. As well as improvements to usability and stability, KVM now offers improved guest boot times and better clock and timer support with updated real time clock support that should improve the performance of RHEL 6 guests on RHEL 5 KVM hosts.

Xen virtualisation has also been worked on to deliver better guest performance, debug logging and support for virtual disk re-sizing with running guests. Security improvements center on OpenSCAP (Open Security Content Automation Protocol) support which is now compliant with NIST's SCAP 1.1 specification. SCAP is a standard framework approach to maintaining secure systems.

The RHEL 5.8 beta is available to Red Hat subscribers at the company's customer portal and full release notes are also available.

(djwm)