Red Hat bumps Enterprise Linux 6 to Beta 2

One step closer to prime time

By Timothy Prickett Morgan, 30th June 2010

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat said today that it has kicked out the second beta of its Enterprise Linux 6, moving the operating system one step closer to production.

In a blog post announcing Beta 2, Red Hat said that the updated stack includes a tweaked installer, fixes for issues that were raised in Beta 1, and some new packages and programs. You can read the full release notes for Beta 2 here if you want to look before you leap, and grab the code here.

Red Hat is asking those who participated in Beta 1 to stick with it and install and test Beta 2 as it goes through the process of hardening RHEL 6 for production work. That said, Red Hat adds that it is perfectly happy to have new testers come in at the Beta 2 level to hunt for bugs and offer advice for improvements. So if you didn't participate in Beta 1, don't think you aren't being invited to the party.

RHEL 6 will be available on x64 systems as well as on IBM Power and mainframe systems. Itanium didn't make the cut, as El Reg exclusively reported last December.

The first beta for RHEL 6 came out on April 21. The distro is based on a Fedora development release using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel with some features in later kernels backported to that kernel, as is Red Hat's standard practice with RHEL versions.

RHEL 6 is all about scalability, theoretically up to 64,000 cores and 256TB of main memory — 128TB for the kernel and 128TB for the userspace for physical memory addressing, which is set at 48-bits — plus an integrated KVM hypervisor that can support 64 cores and 1TB of main memory in a guest operating system running on top of that hypervisor.

Depending on how Beta 2 goes, there may be a Beta 3, says Red Hat, before the software goes into Release Candidate and final release. RHEL generally takes six months or so to go from first beta to production, but Red Hat is in no hurry to rush code out. RHEL 6 won't explicitly drive revenues — like a Windows release does — so there's no point in driving customers nuts. ®

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

COMMENTS

House Rules Send Corrections

All Reader Comments (4)

Highly Rated

Posted Thursday 1st July 2010 09:08 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Good To See

That Redhat does not rush new versions into official release status. Canonical and especially SuSE have done lots of damage by releasing immature Linux distros.

Linux has always been about reliability and I give a fsck about new features which are not stable. And the same is with that horrible KDE Desktop. Serious users expect players like Canonical and SuSE to be conservative in terms of new features and always err on the side of quality and reliability.

Beta stuff should never be part of a release. And if you have nothing new to release, don't yield to the temptation to mess up a distro with the latest crap.

I prefer a rock-solid five-year old GUI over a windoze-looking and buggy hairball any time and I think most other Linux people do that too. FAIL for SuSE !

Posted Monday 5th July 2010 11:49 GMT

alain williams