Key Partners Unlock Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

Red Hat released the latest version of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 (RHEL 6.1), to some of its closest partners at the company’s Red Hat Summit conference.

According to a blog post from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team, the company will release RHEL 6.1 to selected partners at the conference, which ran May 3-6 in Boston, as a step toward the general availability of the operating system, which is expected to occur in the coming weeks.

Final Testing On Hardware Drivers

Red Hat shipped a beta of RHEL 6.1 in late March, and it has since undergone extensive testing.

“Providing the Release Candidate to our partners is a critical, final check on hardware drivers and software features that will be provided in the general availability of the update release,” the RHEL team blog said. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is among the few operating platforms in the industry that is broadly supported across server, storage and network hardware – therefore, the Release Candidate update is distributed to a select set of hardware and software partners on a global basis.”

Further explaining its development and deployment process, Red Hat’s RHEL team said:

“Red Hat is well-known for our collaboration in the upstream community. We have a leadership position in hundreds of open source projects, ranging from the Linux kernel to the GNOME desktop. Our partners are also strong contributors to open source projects. The maturity, market acceptance and community support of Linux drives many IHVs, OEMs and ISVs to develop new functionality and enhance performance first in open source projects.

“Since there is no single source for these community projects, Red Hat engineering selects mature and stable code from community projects to be included in each major release and following update releases. The work to coordinate different projects can be as simple as selecting the mature code, or as complicated as merging overlapping code sets that were not developed together,” the team added.

Meanwhile, according to a Red Hat blog post from March, RHEL 6.1 features virtualisation performance optimisations, new hardware enablement, improved operational efficiency, enhanced development and monitoring tools, and high availability improvements, among other things.

The development and monitoring tools improvements include: a Gdb debugger with improved C++ and Python handling, Valgrind memory tracing enhancements to better match multicore processors, and an open source Eclipse development environment that includes enhanced breakpoint and code generation for C/C++ and Java.