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Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor releases are an aggregation of individual enhancement, security and bug fix errata. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Release Notes documents the major changes made to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system and its accompanying applications for this minor release.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor releases are an aggregation of individual enhancement, security and bug fix errata. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Release Notes documents the major changes made to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system and its accompanying applications for this minor release.
The Release Notes provide high level coverage of the improvements and additions that have been implemented in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7. For detailed documentation on all changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the 5.7 update, refer to the Technical Notes
Note
Refer to the Online Release Notes for the most up to date version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Release Notes.
Note
Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, please use RHN Classic Subscription Management if you have subscriptions for the following products,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for HPC Compute Node
Load Balancer Add-on
For more information on the new features of subscription management, please refer to the Red Hat Knowledgebase.
1. Installation
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installer (also known as anaconda) assists in the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 includes the following enhancements:
A kickstart installation, by default, has the SSH port open in the firewall settings. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, the new "--no-ssh" kickstart option for the firewall command can be used to ensure that SSH access to a system is disabled.
The new blacklist functionality in anaconda is used to avoid the installation or probing of drivers.
anaconda provides added support for the subscription and entitlement changes implemented in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7. Refer to Section 2, “Subscriptions and Entitlement” for further information.
2. Subscriptions and Entitlement
Effective software and infrastructure management requires a mechanism to handle the software inventory — both the type of products and the number of systems that the software is installed on.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7,includes support for the new Entitlement Platform which provides oversight for the software entitlements for an organization and a more effective content delivery system. On local systems, the new Red Hat Subscription Manager offers both GUI and command-line tools to manage the local system and its allocated subscriptions.
A better method to handle subscriptions will help our customers maintain their software compliance and will make installing and updating Red Hat products much simpler.
Xen is a high performance and secure open source virtualization framework. Virtualization allows users to run guest operating systems in virtual machines on top of a host operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 provides the following bug fixes and enhancements for Xen:
The performance of Xen guests in 32-bit domains is improved.
The maximum amount of disks that can be attached to a Xen guest has been increased from 100 to 256.
The time needed to boot Xen guests is reduced.
Xen guests now support up to 4 serial ports.
xz compression support is now available in Xen pygrub.
3.2. KVM
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 includes support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. KVM is integrated into the Linux kernel, providing a virtualization platform that takes advantage of the stability, features, and hardware support inherent in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This release provides the following bug fixes and enhancements:
CDROM emulation in KVM is improved.
Live migration convergence speed is improved.
issues with the boot order of virtual machines have been fixed.
4. Device Drivers
4.1. Storage Drivers
The bnx2i driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II iSCSI has been updated to version 2.6.2.3
The mpt2sas driver that supports the SAS-2 family of adapters from LSI has been updated to version 08.101.00.00. Most notably, this update provides support for WarpDrive SSS-6200 devices.
The megaraid driver is updated to version 5.34
The arcmsr driver for Areca RAID controllers is updated
The bfa driver for Brocade Fibre Channel to PCIe Host Bus Adapters is updated to the current scsi-misc version.
The be2iscsi driver for ServerEngines BladeEngine 2 Open iSCSI devices is updated.
The qla2xxx driver for QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs is updated to version 8.03.07.00.05.07. Additionally, the qla24xx and 25xx firmware is updated to 5.03.16.
The lpfc driver for Emulex Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters is updated to version 8.2.0.96 driver.
The IBM Virtual Ethernet (ibmveth) driver is updated, adding support for the optional flush of the rx buffer, scatter-gather, rx_copybreak, and tx_copybreak support, and enhanced power virtual ethernet performance.
The ibmvfc driver is updated to version 1.0.9
The mptfusion driver is updated to version to 3.04.18rh
The cciss driver for HP Smart Array controllers has been updated, adding kdump support and performance mode support on the controller.
4.2. Network Drivers
The cxgb4 driver for Chelsio Terminator4 10G Unified Wire Network Controllers is updated.
The cxgb3 driver for the Chelsio T3 Family of network devices is updated.
The e1000 driver for Intel PRO/1000 network devices has been updated, adding support for the Marvell Alaska M88E1118R PHY and CE4100 reference platform.
The enic driver for Cisco 10G Ethernet devicesis updated to version 2.1.1.9
The myri10ge driver for Myricom Myri-10G Ethernet devices has been updated to version 1.5.2
The igb driver for Intel Gigabit Ethernet Adapters is updated
The tg3 driver for Broadcom Tigon3 ethernet devices is updated to version 3.116, adding support for EEE.
The bna driver for Brocade 10Gb Ethernet devices is updated to version 2.3.2.3
The qlcnic driver is updated to 5.0.13, adding support for large receive offload (LRO) and generic receive offload (GRO)
The netxen driver for NetXen Multi port (1/10) Gigabit Network devices is updated to version 4.0.75, adding support for GbE port settings.
The be2net driver for ServerEngines BladeEngine2 10Gbps network devices is updated, adding support for multicast filter on the Lancer family of CNAs and enabling IPv6 TSO support.
The ixgbe driver for Intel 10 Gigabit PCI Express network devices is updated to version 3.2.9-k2, adding support for FCoE and kcq2 support on the 57712 device.
The iwl6000-firmware is updated to version 9.221.4.1.
The iwl5150-firmware package is now available on the Supplementary CD.
The 1000e driver is updated to version 1.3.10.
The ixgbevf driver is updated to version 2.0.0-k2.
The igbvf driver is updated.
The bnx2x driver is updated version to 1.62.00-6, adding DCB/PFC, FCoE ring support, 57712 device support and BCM84823 to the supported PHYs. Additionally, the bnx2x firmware is updated to version 6.2.5.0.
The bnx2 driver is updated to version 2.0.18+.
The atl1e driver for Atheros GbE NICs driver is now available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7.
The iw_cxgb4 driver is now available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7.
The iw_cxgb3 driver is updated
4.3. Graphics Drivers
The vesa driver is updated, to allow the native screen resolution (1366x768) to be set on Dell M4500 machines.
The ati driver is updated, enabling DisplayPort interfaces on RV635/RV730 cards
The mga driver is updated, providing support for G200eH/eR devices.
5. Filesystem/Storage Management
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 provides the following notable filesystem improvements:
A new debugging facility for Network File System (NFS) address space operations (aops)
Additional checks to ensure that quota limits cannot be set too high.
5.1. Global File System 2 (GFS2)
The Red Hat GFS2 file system is a native file system that interfaces directly with the Linux kernel file system interface (VFS layer). When implemented as a cluster file system, GFS2 employs distributed metadata and multiple journals.
GFS2 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes the following notable new features:
The fallocate() system call preallocates filesystem blocks to a file. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 introduces support for the fallocate() system call on the GFS2 filesystem.
Performance when bouncing locks in a cluster with GFS2 is improved.
gfs2_grow is used to expand the GFS2 filesystem. Previously, growing a GFS2 filesystem that was at capacity (full) was unsupported. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 introduces support for growing a full GFS2 filesytem.
6. System Security Services Daemon (SSSD)
The System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) provides a set of daemons to manage access to remote directories and authentication mechanisms. It provides Name Service Switch (NSS) and Pluggable Authentication Modules(PAM) interfaces toward the system and a pluggable back end system to connect to multiple different account sources.
SSSD in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 includes the following notable bug fixes and enhancements:
The new ding-libs package provides utility functions to manipulate filesystem pathnames (libpath_utils), a hash table which dynamically resizes to achieve optimal storage and access time properties (libdhash), a data type to collect data in a hierarchical structure for easy iteration and serialization (libcollection), a dynamically growing, reference-counted array (libref_array), and a library to process configuration files in initialization format (INI) into a library collection data structure (libini_config).
Added support for netgroups
Group support to the simple access provider is now supported.
A Kerberos access provider is now included to honor .k5login.
Improved support for delayed online Kerberos authentication.
Significantly reduced time between connecting to a network or Virtual Private Network (VPN) and acquiring a Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT).
The new automatic Kerberos ticket renewal feature allows long-lived processes or cron jobs to function even when the user logs out.
Support for providing kerberos tickets for long-lived processes or cron jobs even when the user logs out
Support for 'shadow' access control.
Support for authorizedService access control.
Ability to mix-and-match LDAP access control features.
A new option, providing separate password-change LDAP servers for platforms where LDAP referrals are not supported.
Performance improvements when group processing RFC2307 LDAP servers.
A new option, dns_discovery_domain for better configuration when using SRV records for failover.
