Red Hat has announced the general availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 operating system with improved functionality for enhanced performance, flexibility, and security. Also introduced is the beta release for Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) that is available as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. SAM is an application for on-premise subscription management, asset inventorying, and subscription usage reporting.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 includes noteworthy enhancements for virtualization. The spice-client package now adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 hosts. These improvements also allow users to access their desktop virtual machines over a WAN connection in addition to the local network. In addition, KVM enhancements include improved guest boot times and improved clock and timer support. The KVM hypervisor has updated real time clock (RTC) support for better performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 KVM hosts. There are also additional KVM enhancements to increase the manageability and stability of KVM hosts and Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests; and Xen enhancements provide improved guest performance, improved logging for debug, and virtual disk re-sizing while a guest is running.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 also offers new hardware support and enhancements for streamlined installation, as well as security improvements.
For full details, read the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release notes.