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.