Red Hat announces beta of Enterprise Linux 6

LEADING US LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has given the public a first look at the next version of its Enterprise Linux distribution.

The firm has begun offering the beta of its next Enterprise Linux release, and is asking for feedback on what it called the "most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date".

RHEL 6 includes an increased emphasis on virtualisation, as well as improved scalability and availability. New time-keeping improvements to the kernel will let the system move processors that are not active into an idle state more frequently, and could lead to cooler CPUs and power economies, according to Red Hat, while performance has been improved across the board.

Improvements include a complete rewrite of the process scheduler and a range of new multiprocessor lock synchronisation features. Drivers have been updated to take advantage of Nvidia graphics devices, and RHEL also includes 'significant updates' to the GNOME and KDE desktops.

Looking to the future, Red Hat said that RHEL 6 will meet many enterprises' future demands, regardless of how their systems change.

"A primary feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is that it is designed to provide the scalability to handle systems well into the future. Capabilities range from optimised support for large CPU counts and memory configurations to the ability to handle an increased number of system-interconnect buses and peripherals. These capabilities are appropriate for both bare metal and virtualised environments," it blogged.

The new System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) feature allows for centralised identity management, while the SELinux sandbox feature lets administrators better tackle untrusted content. µ