Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 released

On November 19th 2015 Red Hat released the next regular update to their flag ship operating system.

The kernel level for 7.2 is kernel-3.10.0-327.el7. The number of technology previews for System z has been greatly reduced, successful testing allows now support for those features.

Here is my usual summary of links to more information:

• Complete RHEL 7 documentation
• RHEL 7.2 release notes
• RHEL 7.2 known issues
• RHEL 7.2 kernel CVE and bugfix documentation
• RHEL 7 installation guide
• RHEL 7 installation guide for z
• RHEL 7 performance tuning guide
• IBM documentation on developerworks
• RHEL limits
• RHEL lifecycle with the end date for the Extended Update Service (EUS)
• RHEL7 package list (now updated to include 7.2)

From a Linux on z Systems perspective this is a major step. This is the first distribution that supports SMT2 natively.So if you install it, you will have twice as many logical CPUs.

And this is the first Red Hat distribution that supports the High Availability and Resilient Storage Add-Ons. So far some restrictions apply, but they hopefully can be lifted in later releases.

(updated 4/26/2016) 

Fedora 23 for IBM z Systems released

The new Fedora 23 for z Systems / s390x was released 11/10/2015. Thanks to the Fedora team for making this available! The kernel level is kernel-4.2.3-300.

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