Beta Release : Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Beta 1

Excerpts from the release announcement.

Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the *beta* release of 5.1 (kernel-2.6.18-36.el5) for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family of products including:

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is still in development and therefore the contents of the media kit, the implemented features, and the supported configurations are subject to change
before the release of the final product. The supplied beta packages and CD images are intended for testing purposes only.
Remember that this early access software is not supported and is not intended for production environments. Do not publish any benchmark or performance results based on this beta release.
Upgrading from beta releases to the GA product will not be supported. The beta testing period is scheduled to continue through September 4, 2007.


Features
---------

This beta release includes the following improvements:

* Virtualization improvements
+ Completion of virtualization support on Itanium2 platforms
- PV (para-virtualized) and HV (fully-virtualized) Itanium2 guests are now fully supported on Itanium2 hardware (HV requires hardware support)
+ Support for 32-bit PV guests on 64-bit AMD64/Intel(r) 64 hosts
+ Improved support for HV guests
- Hot-migration support for HV 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

* Laptop and Desktop improvements
+ Improved ACPI power management support including support for S3 suspend to RAM and S4 hibernate
+ Technology Preview of a Firewire stack which will be fully supported in a subsequent minor release

* Storage improvements
+ Improved support for autofs load balancing with replicated servers
+ Added replication and migration support for NFSv4 referrals
+ Support for installation to and boot from dm-multipath
+ Update of the Sata sub-system
+ Significant stability improvements to the GFS2 file system
+ Ext3 filesystem now fully supports filesystem sizes of up to 16TB
+ Updated CIFS to version 1.48aRH
+ Technology Preview of the iSCSI target device (iSCSI server)

* Serviceability improvements
+ Improvements to the "crash"-analysis tool
+ IPMI and HPI updates
+ Added Kexec/Kdump support for the host in a virtualized environment

* Networking
+ Update of the Infiniband support and addition of RDMA over Ethernet
+ Technology Preview of the new Devicescape wireless network stack
+ Expand in-kernel socket api
+ IPv6 improvements
+ Technology Preview of new mac80211 wireless stack (ipw 4965 wireless adapter) support. Note the iwl4965-firmware package is not in Beta ISOs but is available on RHN

* Windows Interoperability
+ Samba update for improved interoperability
+ PAM/Kerberos and NSS-LDAP updates for improved integration in Active Directory environments

* Security
+ Improved auditing
+ Smartcard support for SSH
+ Integration of LSPP certification related changes

* Other Kernel Improvements
+ Add support for shared page table for hugetlb pages

* General bug fixing and driver updates

Read the full release announcement here.