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Red Hat issues Enterprise Linux 4.7

Red Hat has released the seventh revision of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, RHEL4 for short, which is aimed at corporate customers. The release contains large number of bug fixes and a lot of small improvements. In line with RHEL 5.2, RHEL 4.7 now uses Firefox 3. RHEL 4.7 also provides "para-virtualized" drivers. These drivers allow RHEL 4.7, when running as a guest in a paravirtualized environment as such as Xen, to access the virtualised hardware without any emulation. This in turn increases I/O throughput and reduces the load on the CPU.

Red Hat has cautiously extended the packages that were originally supplied with RHEL 4, so there are no obvious version number changes. The kernel is based on the now rather old Linux version 2.6.9, but Red Hat developers have back-ported many improvements from later kernels in order to support newer hardware. This means that RHEL 4.7 kernel can now handle Intel's I10 or AMD's new motherboard chipsets. Alongside updates for newer network and storage devices, RHEL 4.7 adds the bnx2x network driver for Broadcom's BCM5710.

Read more at heise online

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