Red Hat, the Open Source leader, is proud to announce the first beta release of the upcoming 5.2 version of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux
operating system. Powered by the 2.6.18-84.el5 Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta comes with the following improvements:
Virtualization improvements
• Hypercall interface for NUMA topology discovery;
• Optimized placement at guest start up;
• Support in libvirt;
• Physical CPU support increase to 64 CPU/system;
• Large Memory Support increased to 512 GB/system;
• Network interfaces in para-virtualized guests no longer limited to 3.
Kernel improvements
• Add NFS client support for servers with 64-bit inode numbers;
• Enable config options for IPMI panic handling;
• Add HDMI support for AMD/ATI integrated chipsets;
• Update Infiniband support to OFED v1.3;
• Eliminate erroneous PCI ROM warning messages;
• Add support to offline CPU when realtime process is running.
Cluster Improvements:
• Resource Event Scripting Language allows complex application failover capabilities;
• Plock performance improvement;
• SCSI 3 reservation fencing support for active/active and active/passive DM/MPIO (multipathing).
Networking and IPv6 Enablement:
• Improved IPv6 compliance;
• SNMP IPv6 MIB improvement;
• IKE 2 support via OpenSwan;
• DHCPv6 client and server;
• Add memory accounting in UDP.
Laptop and Desktop Enhancements:
• Suspend and Hibernate improvements;
• Evolution 2.12.3;
• Firefox 3;
• OpenOffice 2.3.0;
• Thunderbird 2.0;
• Updated graphics drivers.
Encryption and Security Enhancements:
• New kernel crypto hardware driver APIs;
• SHA-256 / SHA-512 password encryption support;
• Add RFC4303 compliant auditing support.
The following known issues are present in this beta:
• Bug 428323: yum-updatesd: local variable 'result' referenced before assignment;
• Bug 430297: ibft_iscsi when used with Intel NIC which have iBFT misconfigured crashes;
• Bug 432776: /sbin/mkinitrd: line 939: [: : integer expression expected;
• Bug 432792: %post scriplet failure when installing: freeipmi-ipmidetectd;
• Bug 432977: Error in /etc/init.d/irqbalance results in potential misconfiguration and screen garbage;
• Bug 434847: RHEL4.6 -> RHEL5.2 anaconda upgrade produces multiple errors for several gcc packages;
• Bug 435173: Traceback when performing CDROM install on iBFT enabled iSCSI system;
• Bug 435475: RFE: [Performance] yum update is too slow between minor releases;
• Bug 435978: Rescue mode networking fails to start;
• Bug 436377: LTC42893-Rhel5.2 betarc installation failed calling SIGSEGV.
Just like the current stable version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this beta is available to existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via Red Hat Network. Moreover, installable binary and source ISO images are available via RHN here.
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