Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.
The most obvious change is the shift to the KVM hypervisor (as opposed to Xen). Xen is still in RHEL, but with RHEL 5.4, Red Hat is signaling its intention that KVM (eventually) is to be Red Hat's preferred Hypervisor. It's a preference that Red Hat execs have indicated at multiple points this year and should be no surprise since Red Hat now owns lead KVM vendor Qumranet.
RHEL is Red Hat's flagship platform and the inclusion of KVM is the first really big shift for Red Hat's new virtualization roadmap which favors KVM. Red Hat also has –in private beta - a standalone KVM hypervisor product as well as new server and desktop virtualization management application.
While KVM is the big new item in RHEL 5.4, there are also a few other goodies for users to try out.
Other improvements in the RHEL 5.4 beta include a technology preview for broader Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support including configuration utilities to help setup FCoE on standard network interface cards.
The ext4 filesystem (which is the successor to the default ext3 filesystem) gets an updated technology preview in RHEL 5.4. The recent Fedora 11 release, included ext4 by default and I expect that ext4 could be a major new innovation for the future RHEL 6 release.
Red Hat is also including the newGCC4.4 compiler which includes numerous optimization for compilitation.
As usual with any point upgrade, there is a long list of driver updates and minor optimizations that Red Hat details in the announcement for the RHEL 5.4 beta. The beta period is currently scheduled to last until August 13th.
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