Red Hat has shipped a fresh version of its high-end Linux operating system that pushes support for large x86 systems much higher.

Customers can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Opteron and Xeon servers with up to 64 logical CPUs. The same processor count now applies for IBM's Power chips too. The small club of Itanium processor users already had the luxury of running Red Hat across 64-processor boxes.

Looking ahead, Red Hat has even more ambitious high-end plans. The OS update includes a preview package for running Linux across up to 256 Itanium chips and up to 128 Power chips. These figures apply to logical CPUs as well, so core counts will affect the total number of chips supported.

The latest Red Hat update also ships with support for Intel's upcoming dual-core version of Itanium.

Away from processor specific items, the Red Hat update includes better kernel crash dump analysis tools, support for 4GB Fibre Channel HBAs and a technology preview of Infiniband support via OpenIB.

There's more on the update available here. ®