Red Hat’s next update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 5.2, with major upgrades to the desktop and virtualization, is ready for beta testing.
If your business depends on RHEL, you’ll want to download this beta to get an idea what your servers are going to be working with in a few months. According to the Red Hat letter making the announcement, the newly renovated RHEL will use the 2.6.18-84.el5 Linux kernel.
This beta is being made available across the entire RHEL family. So you can try both the vanilla RHEL 5.2 and the Advanced Platform version on the AMD and Intel 64, Itanium, S/390, System p, and System z platforms. The beta for the RHEL 5 Desktop for x86 and AMD64/Intel is also being made available.
The major upgrades are going to be in virtualization. RHEL is upgrading its core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to Xen 3.1.2. It also features improvements in its NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) interface as well as support for up to 64 processors per system with up to 512GB of memory per server.
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