Red Hat revs Enterprise Linux distro

[WoodPeckr]

I started out with and liked Fedora then moved to Ubuntu. Glad to see Fedora is undergoing some serious development. Here's the latest. The ext4 file system, set to replace the present ext3 file system, looks interesting.

Nehalem-Java-hypervisor love

By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Posted in Operating Systems, 20th January 2009

Red Hat today announced the fourth release of its Enterprise Linux commercial distribution, RHEL 5.3, adding support for new hardware, some virtualization tweaks meant to keep pace with recent innovations to hypervisor technology, and all sorts of other goodies.

RHEL 5.3 offers over 150 enhancements. A number of these features made their debut in Fedora, a Red Hat-sponsored project that creates what amounts to a development release for RHEL - although Fedora contributors get annoyed when you say that.

They like to emphasize the freedom that Fedora has as a standalone software package, more or less free from Red Hat strings and encumbrances. But Red Hat uses Fedora as the foundation for RHEL and that, ultimately, is the purpose of the project. Generally speaking, there are tweaks to the Linux 2.6 kernel, device drivers, and various applications that are part of the distro.

First up in RHEL 5.3 is support for Intel's "Nehalem" Core i7 processors, the desktop processors launched last November that are implemented in a 45 nanometer process, that have a new microarchitecture and an Opteron-like interconnect called QuickPath, and that will be delivered in servers (if all goes well) sometime around the end of March.

RHEL 5.3 not only runs on these chips. It also hooks into the chips' power management features (which saves energy), and it's been tuned to take advantage of their simultaneous multithreading. The Xeon variants of Nehalem for servers will scale up to eight cores, with two virtual threads in each core. In a four socket system, that will mean an operating system and its applications will have 64 threads to play with. That's as many threads as the biggest RISC/Unix SMP box offered at the turn of the millennium, and now, you can pack it all onto one motherboard with big gobs of DDR3 main memory.

Interestingly, Red Hat said that when using the desktop versions of the Nehalem chips - which have four cores - commercial applications running atop RHEL 5.3 showed a factor of 1.7 improvement in performance. With number-crunching and bandwidth-eating workloads typically run on workstations and parallel supercomputers, the speed up on Nehalem chips compared is up by a factor of about 3.5.

RHEL 5.3 also includes OpenJDK, an open implementation of Java SE 6 development kit and runtime for Java. (It is based on the same code base as Sun Microsystems' own JDK, according to Red Hat). The company is claiming that the OpenJDK support combined with its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform yields the first enterprise-grade, fully open source Java stack. (There will be plenty of arguing about that point).

RHEL 5.3 includes support for Global File System 2, an update to GFS that was available for evaluation purposes only on RHEL 5.2. The new release also includes support for data encryption for block devices (mainly disk drives) using the Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) feature. RHEL 5.3 also has an iSCSI boot firmware table that allows the operating system to be booted from disk arrays linked to servers over an iSCSI link. The ability to have a RHEL server be an iSCSI target (meaning a server can act like a disk array to other servers using iSCSI for connectivity) has moved from a tech preview in RHEL 5.2 to production grade in RHEL 5.3. (Although this feature is also in the tech preview section of the release notes).

The SystemTap system monitoring tool has been "rebased" to level 0.7.2 of that project, which has offers a few new features and some minor enhancements, according to RedHat. These include Cluster Manager, Red Hat Package Manger, Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution, and OpenSSL. The OFED tweaks are interesting in that they are a set of open source drivers for Ethernet and InfiniBand networks that implement the Remote Direct Memory Architecture, or RDMA, which in turn allows devices on a network to reach directly into the memory of their peers, thus reducing latencies and speeding up software performance.

A RHEL release always has some technology previews, and RHEL 5.3 is no different. These includes the ext4 file system, which is nearly ready for primetime as a kicker to the ReiserFS and ext3 file systems and a bridge to BTRFS (pronounced "ButterFS"), a future Linux file system. The ext4 file system is designed to support volumes up to 1 exabyte in size, and individual files that are as large as 16 terabytes. ext4 will be able to juggle up to 4 billion files. By comparison, the latest ext3 implementations support file sizes between 16 GB and 2 TB, depending on the block size chosen at install time, with volume sizes topping out at between 2 TB and 16 TB.

BTRFS, which might see the light of day in 2010, was launched in June 2007 and is a POSIX-compliant file system. It will support very large volumes (16 exabytes in size) and a large number of files (two to the power of 64 files, to be precise). The file system has object-level mirroring and striping, checksums on data and metadata, online file system check, incremental backup and file system mirroring, subvolumes with their own file system roots, writable snapshots, and index and file packing to conserve space, among many other features under development. Oracle did a lot of the groundwork for the BTRFS project.

The RHEL 5.3 tech previews also include eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic file system that mounts atop file systems such as ext3, and Stateless Linux, a way to run replicated and read-only Linuxes for distributed workloads. The release also has a tech preview of the GNU GCC 4.3 compiler set (C, C++, and Fortran and their libraries).

Customers who have a support contract will get the updates to RHEL free of charge, since Red Hat does not charge for upgrades on RHEL releases. It won't be long before Oracle and CentOS kick out their clones of RHEL 5.3.

RHEL 5 was launched in March 2007 after about a six-month delay in getting it out the door because of issues concerning the integration of the Xen virtual machine hypervisor with the operating system. Xen was changing so fast then that it was difficult to get RHEL and Xen in synch. This will be less of an issue going forward, now that Red Hat owns Qumranet, which created the alternative KVM hypervisor that is part of the mainstream Linux kernel these days. With RHEL 6, you can bet KVM and not Xen will be the default hypervisor. This is already expected with the Fedora 11 development release due at the end of May, which will be the foundation for RHEL 6 as far as anyone knows. ®

 

[WoodPeckr]

On a related note...

Came across this humorous article and thought it fit in and was worth passing on....enjoy....

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

Inside the mind of John Q Windows

By Ted Dziuba • Posted in Operating Systems, 26th January 2009

Fail and You
Linux will never make any meaningful headway into the desktop. Nope, never. I could cite market share numbers, growth figures, and total cost of ownership studies, but none of that matters (plus, it's boring). Linux will never, ever defeat Windows because Windows has the little blue E.

The blue E on my desktop that I can click takes me to great things like Google, YouTube, and MySpace. It's the E that I click to get a short vacation from the boring blue W where I have to spend hours clicking and dragging to get my text aligned just right. It's the E I can open when I'm tired of looking at tables of numbers in the green X.

That damn green X. Sandy in accounting showed me something in the green X, something about pivoting tables. She says it's going to make my job easier, but I can't figure it out. Maybe I should pick up one of those "Green X for Dummies" books this weekend.

It's not the software behind the blue E, the blue W, and the green X that's keeping Windows's stranglehold on the desktop. You can get a web browser, a word processor, and a spreadsheet anywhere. It's what they represent. Familiarity. Comfort. Dependence. To the average user, the computer is a means to an end. That end is most likely a paycheck, a chat session, or some vile display of pornography that you can never buy in a store because the clerk - the clerk in the smut shop who sees a million vile things a day - will judge you for selecting the vilest of the vile.

The path to each of these ends, in the eyes of the user, can't change. When it does change, users get very upset. Where's my start menu? What happened to Microsoft Word? How do I PivotTable in OpenOffice? I hate it when they change the computers.

Users aren't stupid. They just have better shit to do than learn C++ programming or tinker around with FreeBSD. We techies, who count trolling an internet forum and winning an argument on IRC among some of our greatest accomplishments, find it easy to call users stupid. Idiots. They simply don't have the mental capacity to take a side in the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate. Users are so dumb, they don't even know how to edit Apache's config file. The same users who, years ago, had better shit to do with their time than learn Unix, now have better shit to do with their time than investigate the merits of a new operating system.

To these people, a computer means Windows. There's the Mac, but users see the Mac as something different from the computer. Mac has its own software, its own system. I think graphic designers use the Mac. So, when a normal person buys a computer and it doesn't come with Windows, there's a pretty big disconnect happening, and it's not because the person is dumb. It's because of violated expectations. Linux will never be accepted as mainstream because too many users expect a computer to have Windows.

As an exercise for the IT crowd, take a minute and imagine that you're a user. Since you're reading this here, chances are that you've done a stretch of time supporting users in a large organization, so you know the type of people I'm talking about. Imagine you spent four years in college studying philosophy, only to find that in today's job market, more employers are hiring office assistants than philosophers. You use the computer for almost every aspect of your job: scheduling, e-mail, document work, and leisure.

The computer is your job, but it's not you. You spend the day in an 8 foot by 8 foot cubicle – 64 square feet that you've staked out with family pictures, trinkets collected from various tourist traps around the country, and the poster of the cat on the wire that says "hang in there!." For eight hours every day, you breathe the recycled corporate air that's been heated to a temperate 72 degrees. Everything about your environment is sterile enough not to distract you from your work.

One day, as you're taking a personal call but making the conversation uncomfortably informal so as to avoid any eavesdroppers figuring out that it's a personal call, one of those pompous pricks from the IT department shows up to finally do something about that support ticket you filed last week. Your computer blue-screens fairly frequently. Your phone call ends, and you explain the problem to the tech, who isn't really listening. He mentions to you that this Microsoft software is rubbish and that crashes don't happen on Linux. Hey, that sounds pretty good, why don't you give me that Linux thing?

The tech tells you it will take a while to install, so you head off for an hour-and-a-half Presidential coffee break. When you come back, the tech is nowhere to be found and your computer looks different. Nothing works the same as it used to. All of your programs are missing and you can't figure out how to access the company file share. Everything is fucked up, and you can't do your job. Score one for superior engineering.

The alternative ending to this is that the tech installs Linux on your machine, stays for hours to help you learn how to do things that you commonly did on Windows, and because you just love your job so fucking much, you buy a book on Linux so that you can catch up on it in your free time. All to get the same work done as before, but this time, using free software.

Engineering isn't holding Linux back from the desktop. We all know that it's better software than Windows. What's holding Linux back from the desktop are user expectations and IT freetards who compensate for their own non-accomplishment with passive-aggressive superiority. Your average user isn't stupid, he just doesn't care about what operating system uses and is willing to pay the extra money for Windows if it buys him familiarity.

That being said, there's always an exception to the rule. The Reg published a story last week about an American woman who bought a Dell laptop that came with Ubuntu, and her unfamiliarity with it caused her to drop out of school.

Some people are just dumb. ®

 

[Disturbia]

Thanks for the info.

LOL ... and the 2nd one really made me laugh and .. well ... yes Some people are just dumb.