Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Released

[MindSpace]

Red Hat has announced their latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, version 4.8 marking the point where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 enters the autumn of its life cycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now marching toward the Production 2 life cycle phase, formerly known as the “Transition” or “Deployment” phase.Besides the usual bug fixes and software updates, there are also the new features that come with every stable release. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 is available for 32-bit and AMD/Intel 64-bit architectures.

From this point forward, the amount of change introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 minor releases is decreasing constantly as Red Hat focuses its efforts on addressing continued stabilization of the release.This is the 8th major update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 OS, originally introduced in February of 2005. This release includes several new features, bug fixes & security patches.The Key features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 include:-

• Improved virtualization performance and scale
  
  • New, optimized devices drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 virtual guests deployed on the KVM hypervisor that we plan to include in future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 releases. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 virtual guests running on Xen-based systems continues as before.
    
  • Virtual guest support for up to 256 disk devices (increased from 16). This will allow the deployment of much larger virtualized applications.
  
  
• Storage and filesystem enhancements
  
  • Improved Device Mapper reporting is provided to help storage administrators.
    
  • More information captured from HP active-passive arrays helps administrators monitor and configure storage in multipath high-availability configurations.
  
  
  
• Improved Windows interoperability and file system support
  
  • A Samba update to improve Microsoft Windows interoperability, which allows customers to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a secure, reliable, high performance, file server for Microsoft Windows environments.
    
  • Samba support allows customers to attach Microsoft Windows clients to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server without requiring Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs).
    
  • An update to autofs (used to map file systems) provides increased reliability and stability.
  
  
  
• Enhanced developer support
  
  
  • Updated GNU Compiler Collection allows customers to compile applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 with compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This helps customers prepare for moving applications to the newer Red Hat release.
  
  
  
• General performance improvements
  
  • Includes three new “kernel tunables” that allow customers to optimize application performance by reducing latency and improving utilization.
    
  • Updated high-speed networking support with enhancements to the Open Fabric Distribution Networking (OFED) software stack.

[Modifier]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 includes the following improvements:-

1. Kerberos 5 utilities are now PAM enabled
2. Updated IPMItool to v1.8.10
3. Device-mapper to 1.02.28
4. Added router solicitation support
5. Added virtio drivers to support KVM hypervisor environments
6. Added new AMD HDMI audio support to ATI HDMI
7. Updated ALSA hda driver update from upstream
8. Fixed and properly detect pmtimer on ASUS a8v motherboard
9. Improved reliability of Autofs
10. Fixed various short packet handling for NFSv4 readdir and sunrpc issues

The ongoing value of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription is based on the delivery of continuous innovation with key features customers seek, offering performance, security and availability they depend on to run their business. New versions of RHEL are released quite fast and thus, users can upgrade their current version to the newest release free of charge. Red Hat distributed four versions of RHEL: RHEL AS (Advanced Server), RHEL ES (edge, economy or entry-level server), RHEL WS (workstation) and Red Hat Desktop.

[Modifier]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, first shipped in February 2005, is now in the Production 2 lifecycle phase. With this, the focus of product updates in the future will shift away from providing significant code changes and focus on providing critical fixes and helping customers evolve their IT plans for eventual migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The supplied beta packages and CD and DVD images are intended for testing purposes only. Remember that this early access software is not supported and is not intended for production environments. Benchmark and performance results cannot be published based on this beta release without explicit approval from Red Hat.