January 18, 2012

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 6.2. New general features are described in this "what's new" document. The kernel level is now kernel-2.6.32-220.el6.

As usual there are the release notes and the technical notes in two separate documents. 

From the mainframe perspective the top focus has been on stability and reliability. Brad Hinson from Red Hat has done a nice summary of the changes focused on System z. Take a look at it!



My highlights for this release are:
  • Stability - many important bug fixes made it into this release. So if you are on RHEL6.0 or RHEL 6.1 consider upgrading!
  • Support for new crypto functions in the z196
  • Optimized math library for linear algebra functions, which is the ATLAS library optimized for System z
  • Access to raw ECKD data from Linux (read and write)
  • Lot's of updates in the s390utils package, most notably the enhancements for cpuplugd to autonomously manage CPU and memory resources in a virtualized environment.