Red Hat Offers First Beta Of RHEL 6.0

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 21 April 2010 at 08:54 AM EDT. 6 Comments
RED HAT
While the Fedora community is busy coming up with the Fedora 14 codename, its corporate parent, Red Hat, is celebrating the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0. As of this morning, the first public beta is now available for this major update to their flagship Linux enterprise operating system.

We first reported on a few details of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 last year after we heard them mentioned during the Red Hat Summit in Chicago. Those details included improved power management, many virtualization enhancements (mostly for KVM), and other features that have been worked on recently within the most recent Fedora releases.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released three years ago, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is getting primed to enter the world. In this morning's Red Hat blog post outlining this public beta, the major features of RHEL6 include comprehensive power management capabilities, performance enhancements, scalability enhancements, and new security features. There's also greater improvements in the areas of resource management, virtualization, storage, file-system, RAS, the GCC compiler, and the RHEL desktop.

A few specific items that caught our attention were the performance improvements, the big strides made with KVM virtualization (RHEL5 was originally using Xen, but only a few months ago began shipping the Kernel-based Virtual Machine in RHEL 5.4), GCC being upgraded to 4.4.x, and the Nouveau graphics driver being used by RHEL for providing a free software NVIDIA driver. Yes, Nouveau is now shipping in an enterprise-grade distribution.

With Red Hat's claims of performance enhancements, it should be of no surprise to you that we are currently testing these claims with a set of Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks to see how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta is performing compared to RHEL/CentOS 5.4, and also Fedora. These results should be published tomorrow.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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