[lotuseclat79]

KVM is the feather in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

Red Hat has released RHEL 5.4, a major point update of its commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces support for KVM, a significant milestone in Red Hat's evolving virtualization strategy.

KVM has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20 and has become the favored virtualization solution of the upstream kernel community. Use the Linux command: uname -a to find out what version of Linux your distribution is based upon.

-- Tom

[060456F]

While Red Hat says RHEL 5.4 with KVM is the foundation of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, Red Hat is not abandoning Xen, an open source hypervisor the company adopted in RHEL 5.0.


RHEL 5.4 also includes support for Intel's Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) and SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), a PCI-SIG standard that lets a single physical adapter act as multiple virtual adapters available to virtual machines. The technology works with Intel's Xeon Processor 5500 Series-based platform. RHEL 5.0 also works with AMD's Istanbul platform.
Network advancements in 5.4 include Generic Receive Offload (GRO), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) performance enhancements and hardware support, and device driver enhancements such as disk and network.
For system administrators and developers, Red Hat has upgraded its Systemtap performance monitoring toolset, which supports profiling and monitoring C++ applications. Red Hat has also included a number of static kernel tracepoints to simplify performance observation for the highest profile kernel subsystems.
RHEL 5.4 also includes a preview implementation of the malloc memory allocation library optimized for multicore processors.