Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Released

An anonymous reader writes: Today, Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, with new features designed to meet both modern datacenter and next-generation IT requirements for cloud, Linux Containers, and big data. The new version includes Linux containers (LXC), which let Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers, improved MS Active Directory / Identity Management (IdM) integration, XFS as the default file system, scaling to 500 TB (additional file system choices such as btrfs, ext{3,4} and others are available), a new and improved installation experience, managing Linux servers with OpenLMI, enhancements to both NFS and GFS2, optimized network management, bandwidth, the use of KVM Virtualization technology and more. See the complete list of features here (PDF). CentOS 7 shouldn't be lagging too far behind due to recent cooperation between Red Hat and CentOS project.

Re:People still use Red Hat?

[armanox]

Stable is the word you are looking for.

Re:So CentOS will be out in 2016?

[Anonymous Coward]

rhel7 comes with glibc 2.17.

Re:... and with systemd.

[Anonymous Coward]

But a lot of them will. It turns out that systemd is actually kind of good.

Re:Good and bad...

[thaylin]

Systemd is not nice because it does all that stuff. Init is not supposed to do all that stuff, because it makes it bulky, gives additional avenues of attack, and is just all around a pain. What would have been better would have been to make systemd a modular system so that if you want it to handle all that, it can, but if you dont, it just does the parallel start up.

Re:Some nice looking features/updates

[Peter H.S.]

I have always admired RH for it's feature set and pursuit of enterprise-related features.
I do however have one gripe: All the config files are in the wrong place!
This isn't a real complaint, more akin to a whine. I have been using Debian for too many years on far too many servers; my muscle memory demands that the config files that I need to edit be located in the same place across distros.
Does anybody know why there is such a difference in file locations? /etc/network/interfaces
vs /etc/sysconfig/network/networking/where/are/the/damn/config/files

I think the differences are just the normal fragmentation between different distros, with everyone having their own idea of the "correct" place to put the config files. The systemd project is trying to establish a cross distro standard for some of the important config files, making it easier for upstream projects to know where e.g. /etc/os-release is (on non-systemd distros it can be "hidden" almost everywhere).

Systemd is the most important new feature of RHEL 7, since the core of the OS now have been making a huge leap forward in security and reliability regarding processes and deamons. It is now a piece of cake to utilize advanced kernel features like "capabilities" http://man7.org/linux/man-page... [man7.org] and "cgroup" https://www.kernel.org/doc/Doc... [kernel.org]

All major distros are about to change to "systemd"; Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian. Their derivatives like CentOS, Sci-Linux, Fedora etc. are also changing to systemd, so in a few years, systemd will simply be the new standard toolbox to maintain and run Linux distros, and part of the new future Linux development stack; systemd, Wayland, cgroups and kdbus.

So every Linux System Administrator who have been to procrastinating regarding learning systemd, better start reading up on the subject. A good place to start is : http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... [freedesktop.org]

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:People still use Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think a hobby distribution that didn't even have package signing until 6 months ago is a competitor to RedHat?

Reverting to init

[hankypooh]

Can one revert to init, rather than using systemd?