Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5.2

Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5.2

By Greg McNevin

Month Date, 2008: Open source software provider Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux 5.2,boasting new hardware support capabilities, new software and a range ofother improvements.

The new version features enhanced capabilities in six major areas,covering virtualisation, desktop, security, clustering, networking andhardware support.

Virtualisation in particular has been giving a boost with very largesystems (with up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of memory) now supported, as wellas virtualisation support for NUMA-based architectures and CPU frequencyscaling for virtualised environments.

Red Hat says Enterprise Linux 5.2 also provides enhanced capabilities forseveral hardware architectures, such as x86/x86-64, Itanium, IBM POWER andIBM System z, which leads to improved performance, reduced power usage andbetter scalability and manageability.

The company uses Intel's Dynamic Acceleration Technology as an example onthis front, saying the open source operating system permits power savingby quiescing idle CPU cores, and offers performance gains by potentiallyoverclocking busy cores within safe thermal levels.

Other hardware enhancements include extensive device driver updates,covering storage, network and graphics devices, and certification of IBM'snew Cell Blade systems.

“With this announcement, Red Hat Enterprise Linux becomes a certifiedoperating system for IBM's new high-performance blade server based on CellBroadband Engine Architecture,” said Jim Comfort, vice president, WorkloadOptimised Systems for IBM Systems and Technology Group.

“These systems can deliver dramatic performance results in clientapplications that include digital content creation, electronic designautomation, image and signal processing, financial algorithms, scientificresearch and seismic processing.”

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