Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 2

Red Hat has released, in beta, Enterprise Linux 6, which the company claims is its most ambitious operating platform release to date.

Wednesday's release comes more than three years after the release of Enterprise Linux 5, which the company plans to continue to support until 2014. The new release features updated core technology, from the kernel to the application infrastructure, to the development tools, Red Hat said.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 blurs the lines between virtual, physical, and cloud computing to address shifts taking place in the modern IT environment," the company said in its news blog.

The major themes in the latest release include pervasive virtualization, improved scalability and availability and increased power efficiency, Red Hat said. In the area of energy efficiency, Red Hat has made time-keeping improvements within the kernel that allow the system to transition processors that do not have active tasks into an idle state more frequently.

Performance enhancements within the Enterprise Linux 6 kernel include a rewrite of the process scheduler, so that it more fairly shares computer cycles among processes and enables higher-priority processes to run with minimal interference with lower-priority processes. To boost scalability, the new operating platform has been designed to support larger CPU counts and memory configurations than its predecessor.

New security features include the System Security Services Daemon, which provides central management of identities. Also, a new framework called Control Groups offers finer-grained control, allocation and management of hardware resources.

Enterprise Linux 6 includes the ext4 file system, which is the next generation of the extended file system family. Ext4 includes support for larger file sizes, more efficient allocation of disk space, better file system checking and more robust journaling.

In the area of virtualization, the new operating system builds on the integrated KVM virtualization platform to offer more flexibility and control regardless of the deployment model.

Red Hat has posted a free download of Enterprise Linux 6 beta