Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 General Availability Announcement

[Nirmal Pathak]

Red Hat is pleased to announce the general availability of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (kernel-2.6.18-53.el5) including:

   - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform for x86,
     AMD64/Intel(r) 64, Itanium Processor Family, S/390, System p
     and System z
   - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server for x86, AMD64/Intel(r) 64,
     Itanium Processor Family, S/390, System p and System z
   - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop for x86 and AMD64/Intel(r)

This update includes the following enhancements:

   Virtualization improvements

   - Completion of virtualization support on Itanium2 platforms
     + PV (paravirtualized) and FV (fully virtualized) Itanium2
       guests are now fully supported on Itanium2 hardware
       (full virtualization requires hardware assist)
   - Improved support for FV guests
     + Live-migration support for FV guests
     + General performance improvements
     + Host infrastructure for PV drivers (the actual drivers
       will be delivered separately in the context of the
       individual supported guest operating systems)
   - Update of the libvirt management layer
   - New Xen 3.1.0 hypervisor (and updates to libvirt and
     userspace to work against hypervisor ABI)
   - AMDV support for domain migration and save/restore
   - Added Kexec/Kdump support for the host in a virtualized
     environment

   New kernel features includes:

   - Improved ACPI power management support including support
     for S3 suspend to RAM and S4 hibernate
   - Support for installation to and boot from dm-multipath
   - Updated SATA subsystem
   - Ext3 filesystem now fully supports filesystem sizes of up
     to 16TB
   - Updated CIFS to version 1.48aRH
   - IPMI and HPI updates
   - Updated Infiniband support to OFED1.2 version including
     RDMA over Ethernet
   - Expanded in-kernel socket API
   - IPv6 improvements
   - Added support for shared page table for hugetlb pages

   Hardware support enhancements:

   - Driver updates include:
     3w-9xxx, aacraid, aic79xx, aic94xx, alsa, arcmsr, b44,
     bnx2, cciss, chelsio, e1000, ipmi, ipw2100, ipw2200, ixgb,
     lpfc, megaraid, megaraid_sas, mpt-fusion, pci, powernow-k8,
     qla2xxx, qla3xxx, qla4xxx, s2io, sky2, spidernet, stex, tg3

   - Drivers added:
     e1000e, forcedeth, netxen_nic, xinput

   Other notable additions:

   - Improved auditing
   - Smartcard support for SSH
   - Integration of LSPP certification related changes
   - Samba update for improved interoperability
   - PAM/Kerberos and NSS-LDAP updates for improved integration
     in Active Directory environments
   - Improvements to the "crash"-analysis tool
   - Added replication and migration support for NFSv4 referrals
   - Improved support for autofs load balancing with replicated
     servers


Technology Previews
-------------------

Technology Preview features are included in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux to provide the features with wide exposure.
Customers may find these features useful in a non-production
environment.  Customers are free to provide feedback and
functionality suggestions for a Technology Preview feature
before it becomes fully supported in a future release.
Technology Preview features are currently not supported under
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 subscription services, may not be
functionally complete, and are not supported for production
use.

Erratas will be provided for high-severity security issues in
Technology Preview features.  Red Hat intends to fully support
Technology Preview features in a future release.  See the Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Release Notes for more information
about these Technology Previews:

   - Support for 32-bit PV guests on 64-bit AMD64/Intel(r) 64 hosts
   - Significant stability improvements to the GFS2 file system
   - Stateless Linux
   - AIGLX including X server and updated Mesa package
   - New devicescape (d80211) stack enabling ipw 4965 wireless
     driver
   - FS-Cache file system
   - Systemtap
   - iSCSI target device (iSCSI server)
   - Firewire stack



-- Nirmal D Pathak.
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I was born free!
No Gates and Windows can restrict my Freedom!!

Enjoy Linux!
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