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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Bèta

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Bèta is now available. Most interesting improvements, apart from the usual bug fixes, performance benefits and better hardware support, are the introduction of KVM virtualization (in addition to regular Xen-based virtualization). New hardware support in virtual environments through SRIOV (Single Root I/O for Virtualization), utilities for management of FCoE cards over Internet, FIPS-140 security certification and a libvirt Perl interface for virtualization. Read the release notes for full details.

Better yet is this announcement: "An important feature of any Red Hat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user APIs are unchanged, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. This situation extends to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical machines are also certified when run in virtual machines. So the portfolio of thousands of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to both environments."

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