Red Hat Puts Out RHEL 5 Beta 1 Code

Published: September 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat last Friday put out the first beta of its future Enterprise Linux 5 release. Among other things, RHEL 5 will be the first implementation of Red Hat's Linux stack that will offer integrated support for the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor, created by XenSource and many of its partners on the Xen project. RHEL 5 is expected to be available by the end of the year or so, and will bring Red Hat on par, in terms of server virtualization, with Linux rival Novell.

Back in mid-July, Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and its companion desktop variant, boasting that it was about a half-year ahead of Red Hat in terms of getting Xen hypervisor support integrated into its commercialized Linux. At the time, Red Hat executives said Xen was not really ready for primetime, and when it was, Red Hat would have its RHEL 5 release out. Novell has argued that Red Hat is just saying that because it is behind Novell when it comes to Xen integration. Whatever the case may be, Novell's lead is slipping away if Red Hat has been able to hit the RHEL 5 Beta 1 milestone.

Beta 1 of RHEL 5 has the Xen 3.0.3 hypervisor integrated in the Linux distro for 32-bit i386 (X86) and 64-bit X86_64 (X64) processors; Red Hat is also putting out a technology preview of this Xen software running on RHEL 5 on Itanium processors. The Power platform and the mainframe do not yet have Xen support, but IBM is working on helping Xen do Power.

In addition to integrated Xen hypervisor support, RHEL 5 Beta 1 has support for iSCSI disk links as well as improvements to Autofs, a kernel-based automounter for Linux systems. The beta also has InfiniBand and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support for InfiniBand networking--important for parallel supercomputers and data warehouses--from OpenFabrics. The release also includes SystemTap, a project run jointly by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, and Hitachi that is creating a tool to probe the kernel as it is running and gather information on exactly what it is doing as applications run. Red Hat is also adding support for Frysk's system monitoring and debugging tool. You can participate in the beta by clicking here.

Red Hat also says that RHEL 5 will replace Diskdump and Netdump with Kexec and Kdump. The operating system will have clustering and cluster file system improvements--including fail-over clustering and Web load balancing--as well as parallel storage access through an integrated cluster volume manager and global file system. RHEL 5 also includes Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux) security improvements, and a preview of the Stateless Linux that Red Hat has been developing to make Linux easier to configure, reconfigure, and manage. Finally, RHEL 5 also includes a new driver model that allows integration with drivers that are outside the Linux kernel tree. All of these features are there for the testing in Beta 1.

The first beta has a copy of RHEL 5 Client, which only runs on X86 and X64 clients; the RHEL 5 Server is available on these two platforms as well as on Itanium-based servers, IBM's Power-based iSeries/System i and pSeries/System p servers, and IBM's zSeries and System z mainframes.

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