Fedora 18 for IBM System z released

The Fedora release 18 for System z is here. And this time Dan Horák and the team did a great job as this happened only 8 days after the Intel release!

The download is available from the Fedoraproject site and the respective mirrors and known issues  are covered in the wiki.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 5.9. You can find more information on this here:

• Announcement
• Release Notes
• Technical Notes
• Kernel update page including a list of bug fixes 
• kernel level: kernel-2.6.18-348.el5. 

With this release in the life cycle of RHEL 5, the distribution is now in "Production 2". End of production is still a while out, but this means that from now on there will only be limited hardware enablement, no new software features and no new installation images. For the exact details see the life cycle page from Red Hat.

From a mainframe perspective there are two new features included in this release. VDSO will speed up certain system calls (e.g. gettimeofday) and HyperPAV will help FICON based I/O quite a bit. So please enable it, especially for Oracle databases!
An interesting enhancement in subscription manager now allows packages to be "locked" to a certain release. They won't be automatically updated with the next RHEL 5.10 if locked to e.g. 5.9.

New Whitepaper: "Oracle Database on Linux on System z - Disk I/O Connectivity Study"

For databases the IO performance is very important. This new whitepaper tries to develop guidelines for disk configuration and tuning hints for both ECKD and FCP devices. It also compares Oracle 10 and Oracle 11 for the transactional workload used. So if you needed a reason for an Oracle upgrade - there is another one.