Red Hat Releases RHEL 6 Public Beta 1 148
An anonymous reader writes "It was way back on 2006-09-07 when Red Hat released its first public beta of Enterprise Linux 5. Today, after more than three years, Red Hat finally releases its first public beta of its next-generation OS: RHEL 6 public beta 1. From the news release: 'We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today's Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners, and members of the public to install, test, and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.'"
Too bad they gave up on XEN (Score:5, Informative)
We have an environment with AMD Opteron 270 based servers where we use virtualization heavily. We either have to give up on the servers or on RHEL 6. I think that we'll stick with EL5 until we go into a server refresh cycle.
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They replaced it with KVM, but it still bears some stigmata in Xen community.
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>but it still bears some stigmata in Xen community.
You mean when Xen community members here "KVM" they hit nails through their wrists ?
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More like atheist making a pun out of the fact that your spelling error has meaning. Well, I thought it was funny.
May I recommend some humoroid supplements ?
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Don't really care about Xen vs. KVM from a product perspective, but for the Opteron 270, Xen is the only one that works since that Opteron doesn't have hardware virtualization instructions. KVM doesn't (to my knowledge) support software based paravirtualization like Xen.
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Try VirtualBox. It performs well, even when not using hardware virtualization support.
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While I've been a fan of VirtualBox for a while too, with the Oracle acquisition I wonder if adopting it now isn't just asking to take a ride onto another abandoned VM platform. Oracle already has Oracle VM [wikipedia.org], which is Xen based. At this point it looks like Oracle is going to turn VirtualBox into a gateway product [virtualization.info] used to hook people used to upsell onto Oracle VM. I'm not sure what that bodes for the future of VirtualBox development. I'm guessing that Oracle shifting development focus toward Oracle produc
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You also must notice that Virtualbox has a couple of proprietary features that are only available if you pay them: Support for USB and RDP. This is the typical Sun open source business model, open source it but require copyright assignment to all external code contributions, so that Sun can release an alternative version with propietary addons (which even the external contributors have to pay for)
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RDP I can understand, but please tell me the usage of USB passthrough in a datacenter environment? (that can't be easily done through the host by other means (such as shared directories))
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Aaah yea, HASP keys. Gah, I hate those.
(Better than the old white Parallel port pass-through ones though)
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I wasn't the one who suggested VirtualBox as a Xen replacement. If your position is that "VirtualBox = desktop", that's just further evidence that it's probably not appropriate for the FP here to adopt, which is in line with my suggestion to tread carefully in that direction.
While primarily targeting the desktop, VirtualBox was becoming increasingly useful as a server virtualization solution. My main point was that such improvements are less to continue now, because Oracle already has a Xen based solution
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VirtualBox was becoming increasingly useful as a server virtualization solution.
You must have had a lot of fun on 4/20 - you seem to still be under affects from that day.
VirtualBox is great for a 5 second "does this work for an XP user?" answer. There is no reasonable justification for using it to host a server of any sort of production value.
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VirtualBox = desktop Xen=server completely different products, comparing them is nonsense
By this, you either mean:
1. VirtualBox doesn't support 'server' guest operating systems -- This would be incorrect as VirtualBox does support server guest operating systems. In fact, if your guest OS is Linux, it doesn't matter if the distro is a 'server' distro or a 'desktop' distro.. the OS packages are the same, except for their versions and distro-specific patches.
OR
2. VirtualBox doesn't have features typically used by admins who deploy server operating systems -- While this may have been correct years
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Or you could go with VMWare, which also works with paravirtualised guests, and has pretty good support.
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You could always use Qemu sans KVM
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Do you mean that your virtualization hosts are bleeding for no explained reason, or are you trying to say that RedHat carries a social stigma because of their acquisition of Qumranet and support for their KVM platform?
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I use xen extensively too so its a good job EL5 will still be supported for many more years (until 2014 they say but all bets are off after 2012 ;) ).
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This is modded as funny, but if you see their Life Cycle page at:
https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ [redhat.com]
You can see that there's a 3 phase cycle for release support. Major versions are supported for 7 years, with the first 4 years being "primary support", i.e. new features, hardware support, and bug / security patches, and then after that they move into a maintenance cycle in which they will first not push new features, and finally only push bug fixes / security patches that are marked as "critical
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Too bad except the Xen they shipped in RHEL5 has been nothing but a headache for me. VMs set to auto-start don't. Sometimes. Rarely they hang on the way down and have to be killed. Trying to put a different version of RHEL or Fedora on often results in failure (conflicting paravirt support from the kvm switch = no dice).
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I don't know the politics, but as someone who has to support two-too-many Xen hosts, I really can't fault Red Hat for ditching that bastard system. It had great potential until Citrix plastered their cursed name all over it, along with a nerfed GUI that doesn't even have a Linux port. Fast-forward to 2010 and the only people who don't retch at the sound of Xen, are the people who have already thrown gobs of money at Citrix to throw broken solutions at their non-problems.
QEMU Accelerator (Score:2)
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This was announced about a year ago...old news. They were always going to give up on Xen when they purchased Qumranet...makers of KVM and the SPICE protocol.
Why the KVM vs XEN dispute? (Score:2)
Re:Why the KVM vs XEN dispute? (Score:4, Informative)
The Citrix stuff had little to do with it. Th Linux kernel developers favor code that is easy for them to integrate and maintain, and KVM fit better into that model than Xen. There are some situations where it performs quite a bit better too, and frankly few people care about those stuck with processors that don't have the right extensions to use KVM. Some good reading on the background here includes Discover the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine [ibm.com], Linux: KVM Paravirtualization [kerneltrap.org], and The truth about KVM and Xen [codemonkey.ws].
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Actually I didn't quite understand if the favored linux virtualization code switched from xen to kvm because of Citrix buying xen and messing with the project, or some other reason.
KVM is Linux, XEN isn't Linux. Redhat is a Linux vendor so prefers Linux over things that are not Linux.
It's not a matter of one being better than the other but a matter of picking one that's closer to what you already know.
Simpler for maintenance (Score:2)
A lot of system management utilities had to treat execution under dom0 quite differently than on linux normally. A lot of the industry would rather have a hypervisor platform with a 'normal' OS behavior to it.
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http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page [linux-kvm.org] - It says clearly that it uses "x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD V)".
See also: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Status [linux-kvm.org]
On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization [wikipedia.org] it says that the AMD V instructions came up in the second generation Opteron processors (the ones with Socket F).
Furthermore, from the same Wikipedia: "All Socket 939 and only Sempron processors except Sable, Huron and Sargas do not include support for AMD-V".
If you don't
Direct download links (Score:4, Informative)
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/6/ [redhat.com]
Or torrent it:
http://www.torrentreactor.net/torrents/5568298/RHEL-6-Beta-64-Bit [torrentreactor.net]
Don't forget to check the sha1sum, which can be verified on the first address:
e0a3a906d7bbbc57b411a213bd5d6ad44d851689 RHEL6.0-20100414.0-AP-x86_64-DVD1.iso
centos tracker! WAS Re:Direct download links (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm, why not try a more legit-smelling tracker? ;)
The CentOS project is serving the beta ISOs from their tracker, but Ill be damned if I can find the .torrent files served via CentOS. $random_blog_guy is serving some which link you up to the CentOS tracker.
http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-i386-beta-dvd.torrent [karan.org]
http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-ppc64-beta-dvd.torrent [karan.org]
http://www.karan.org/stuff/rhel6-x86_64-beta-dvd.torrent [karan.org]
http://torrent.centos.org:6969/ [centos.org]
Sums check out. Waaaay faster than the smoldering ftp.red
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I could have supplied those links. But as this link was on top of the google results, I thought it was best for performance to let everybody join that tracker. I'm now trying to seed both.
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$random_blog_guy merely happens to be a lead CentOS 5 developer. *grin*
which fedora? (Score:4, Funny)
On which fedora is this based?
Re:which fedora? (Score:5, Informative)
The packages mostly match those in Fedora 12, which makes sense as that came out in November and FC13 isn't released yet. However, they have bumped some things. Most notably, the FC12 kernel was 2.6.31, while RHEL6 uses 2.6.32. That's not surprising given a fair number of virtualization and performance features, as well as bug fixes, happened for 2.6.32 [kernelnewbies.org].
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I can confirm that. I was told by a guy from Red Hat recently that it's based on FC12 with some things from FC13 included.
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It's not even quite that simple unfortunately. I highlighted the kernel example because FC12 is based on 2.6.31, RHEL6 on 2.6.32, and FC13 on 2.6.33. So in that particular case, they're picking a version that doesn't match any Fedora release.
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It's not even quite that simple unfortunately. I highlighted the kernel example because FC12 is based on 2.6.31, RHEL6 on 2.6.32, and FC13 on 2.6.33. So in that particular case, they're picking a version that doesn't match any Fedora release.
FC12 was released with 2.6.31 but is now running 2.6.32, so I guess RHEL6 is closest to FC12.
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IIRC 2.6.32 is considered an "LTS" kernel. Occasionally, kernels are "suggested" to be used for longer support cycle releases for distros. Ubuntu 10.04 is using .32 as well.
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12. ish.
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Too many Linux-incompatible-with-Linux distros (Score:4, Insightful)
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It would be quite wonderful if someone could figure out a way to make packages installable easily on all linux distros, or at least create a few "compatibility profiles". This whole repository ubuntu-vs-debian-vs-redhat-vs-mandriva-vs-older-versions-of-same is a nightmare for newbie users.
This has existed for a long time. It's called 'linux standard base' or LSB.
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Which only covers the filesystem layout and basic services. It says nothing about APIs or versions of libraries.
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Which only covers the filesystem layout and basic services. It says nothing about APIs or versions of libraries.
It specifies versions of libraries. Google it.
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Installation interface is a crucial omission (Score:2)
Specifying the RPM file format is not enough. Without detailed spec of how packages are installed and managed, LSB is of little use. It also doesn't say much about which default settings are considered reasonable. Nor does it deal much with issues of vertical integration (without which a Linux distro can look like a pile of non-cooperating, user-hostile pieces).
Stating in effect ''insert Gnome or KDE here'' doesn't cut it. It leaves a design vacuum (esp. about device-UI and service-UI behaviors) that a desk
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It would be quite wonderful if someone could figure out a way to make packages installable easily on all linux distros,
It's called building all the libraries and bundling them all together. Include them all in the package, and then using a script, craft an LD_LIBRARY_PATH that places this library location at the end of the path, using the OS' libraries if they are present. You need only link to the proper versions of libraries to make this work (that is, most projects just link against the major version; link against the minor as well. That avoids a lot of incompatibility problems, at the expense of being more likely to dri
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Uh, no. OS X provides a rich set of libraries as part of the base OS. Apple goes to great lengths to ensure compatibility between OS versions (libSystem is compatible to version 1). The only time any software includes a library inside their app bundle is if they wrote it or it is an OSS library that isn't in the base OS. Most apps don't need to.
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Nothing in your comment contradicted anything in my comment. Try again.
maybe that is because (Score:2)
...the functional definition of what is a "system library" and what is "other" in a typical Linux-based distro doesn't really exist.
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Re:Too many Linux-incompatible-with-Linux distros (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do newbie users even need to care about that? If you pick a distribution that has a good set of packages, they should rarely have to leave the ones provided with it. Run whatever front-end for package management you've got, make sure all the optional repositories are enabled, and there should be so many packages there the hard part is sorting through them all--not finding even more. Particularly given that so many things that used to be run as local apps have moved onto web applications nowadays, the main headaches for Linux newbies I see is getting their hardware working and making Flash work.
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From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Player [ubuntu.com]
Installing VMware Player on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Ubuntu 8.10
Install required packages build-essential, linux-kernel-headers and linux-kernel-devel
sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-kernel-headers linux-kernel-devel
Download the latest VMware player [vmware.com] e.g. VMware-Player-2.5.1-126130.i386.bundle (download the bundle version, not the rpm one) and run it as root using gksudo. You'll get a graphical installer that installs VMware player for you.
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That would be nice, and it's entirely capable of being done... but it's a nightmare of work all put on the package maintainer's shoulders. So, it usually doesn't happen.
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Repos aren't what you think they are.
Repos are FOR distros. Source is for compatibility.
If you want binaries AND compatibility you want statically compiled binaries which have very few or no dependencies, like the version of Firefox on mozilla.com.
Current PHP? (Score:2)
5.3.1 + pecl mcd and apc! Re:Current PHP? (Score:2)
fuzz:Packages silkey$ pwd /Volumes/RHEL_6.0 i386 Di/Packages
fuzz:Packages silkey$ ls -1 php*
php-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-cli-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-common-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-gd-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-ldap-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-mcrypt-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-mysql-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-odbc-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-pdo-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-pear-1.9.0-1.el6.noarch.rpm
php-pecl-apc-3.1.3p1-1.1.el6.i686.rpm
php-pecl-memcache-3.0.4-3.1.el6.i686.rpm
php-pgsql-5.3.1-7.el6.i686.rpm
php-soap-5.3.1-7.el6.i686
Re:Showing its age (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm. Would you care to explain what you think it is that CentOS would give you that RHEL doesn't?
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Those hugely important features like "more colours in your OS icon" and "a name that doesn't include 'Enterprise' so directly" (yes, I realise CentOS is still based off "enterprise", but RHEL is short-hand for a full name where as CentOS is its name).
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Like RHEL, it's often shortened.
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That'd be what I said - I've never seen anyone call CentOS anything but CentOS. As in "CentOS is called CentOS but no-one ever uses 'enterprise' in its name, even if the 'ent' comes from Enterprise, but RHEL is not just RHEL but Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which people shorten to RHEL because it is too long to say in full".
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Hmmm. Would you care to explain what you think it is that CentOS would give you that RHEL doesn't?
Free access to their repositories..including updates?
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If they have a support contract, they have access to the updates.
Right..and unless Red Hat made a serious change to the way they do business, the support contracts aren't free.
CentOS, on the other hand, does not have this limitation. The public yum repositories available by default in CentOS allows you to install and update packages, whereas in RHEL you have to be a paying customer to use their private yum repos.
Oracle's approach with Oracle Unbreakable Linux (which is essentially a re-hash of CentOS, which in turn is a re-hash of RHEL) is if you're not a paying s
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Right..and unless Red Hat made a serious change to the way they do business, the support contracts aren't free.
But the GP is already paying for it. It's not like I suggested they go out any buy a support contract so they can get the upgrades. They've paid for a contract that they're not using.
However, if you plan on setting up a box to run Oracle on...
If you're setting up a box to run Oracle, just buy the RedHat or Oracle OS support contract. It's a pittance compared to the Database support contract. If you can't afford the Oracle support and OS support, you can't really afford Oracle in the first place. Which is what Oracle told you when they listed the requirement in
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(I use CentOS on development machines, RHEL for production)
1. Releases: Please compare the release date of say, RHEL 4.8 (19/5/09) to CentOS 4.8 (21/8/09).
Or better yet, compare RHEL 5.5 (30/3/10) to CentOS 5.5 (will be ready when its ready).
Now, CentOS devs tend to follow RedHat security updates fairly closely, and I usually see the CentOS updates ~12-48h after their RHEL parents.
However: A. In production environment, I rather not wait 12-48h. B. Given the complexity of major updates (E.g. RHEL 5.5), CentO
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Try CentOSPlus [centos.org] for starters. It throws in Kernels with drivers that aren't included by default by RedHat for example.
I'm not sure if they'll do XEN support for CentOS6 or anything, but its a thought.
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True. But Redhat put a lot of work into Linux, and I'm happy for my company to help fund those coders, so I buy RHEL licences.
Couldn't agree more. I use to run out and plunk down $ every time a new release came out whether I was running RH as my distro or not until they quit selling personal editions.
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https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/ [redhat.com]
https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/ [redhat.com]
They stopped?
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True. But Redhat put a lot of work into Linux, and I'm happy for my company to help fund those coders, so I buy RHEL licences.
I don't but Linux licenses, the company I work for does.
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True. But Redhat put a lot of work into Linux, and I'm happy for my company to help fund those coders, so I buy RHEL licences.
Well...if you don't actually need the support and are only purchasing it as a way to support RedHat, wouldn't it make more sense to just make a donation to them and continue using your distro of choice?
Re:Showing its age (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Showing its age (Score:5, Informative)
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Realistically how long term is "long term". They've been playing by the rules for what? 15 years now? Is it still possible that hey can totally sell out and go back on what they've done? Sure. It's also "possible" that RMS might spend a weekend playing with an iPhone and the App Store and realize he's been wrong all these years. (Which will no doubt lead to yet another complaint about the pain and suffering which is his life.) Red Hat has done a good job of balancing corporate health with Open Source v
Ignorant! (Score:2)
They are NO WAY near violating the spirit of GPL *or* the law. That statement is completely ignorant.
They *bought* Sistina for $31 million and fully open sourced GFS (Global File System).
They *bought* iPlanet Directory Server from Sun and open sourced it.
They *bought* iPlanet Certificate Server from Sun and open sourced it.
They *bought* Qumranet for around $107 million and are currently working to open source the virtual machine management software.
I haven't even started to list the projects that RedHat
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You have heard of mrepo? Lets you make mirrors of redhat that you can then use to yum update your servers.
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I don't use RHEL, but I occasionally get complaints from people who do because it ships with a really ancient glibc that is missing features that I use in my code (you know, really new stuff from the 1999 version of the POSIX spec). For Linux-specific features, I don't believe that the glibc included with RHEL includes timerfd() support, which means that implementing an efficient event-driven application is difficult (you have to mess around with timeouts on epoll() and keep track of them yourself, rather
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Yup that's what led me away from CentOS too, after several years of fighting with packages that wouldn't compile due to unmet dependencies. I managed to survive for a while by packaging my own sets of PHP/MySQL and friends, but that only covered a tiny part of the spectrum. Trailing a few versions behind everything got really annoying, maybe not a big deal for big business, but my work is always on the more experimental side of things. I'm fine with building stuff from source, but the glibc issue cripple
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To be honest your software sounds cutting edge and uses features that haven't made it into the mainstream long term supported server market that RHEL is in.
I'm not sure about his software, but the specific feature (timerfd) he's talking about is not "cutting edge" by any measure - other platforms have had it for decades. I'm surprised that it is still considered newish in Linux land.
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> Linux is killing me!
It does, as always, a good job!
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Don't know the answer to that, but the first mainline kernel to have it is 2.6.33, and it looks like RH6 is using 2.6.32. However, Red Hat has a history of backporting features and bug fixes to their kernel without changing the version, so it's possible. Considering that it takes as long as it does for a major version change (kinda reminds me of Debian there) it would make sense for an Enterprise distro to make sure TRIM support is there.