Red Hat has developed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, a green upgrade that provides support for KVM, the Linux kernel-based virtual machine.
RHEL6 has added sandboxing policies to Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), a security-focused subset of Linux. This is expected to allow sysadmins to isolate sessions or applications better than in previous versions.
For power management, the powertop application in RHEL6 is said to command and monitor power usage in detail.
Control groups, which are expected to allow tasks to be grouped together as an object in terms of their accessibility to system resources, are also implemented in RHEL6.
There is an Aggressive Link Power Management, a power-saving technique that works only on SATA host bus adapters/controllers to move to a low power state when there’s no pending disk I/O.
Directory service and authentication has a new edition of open source software Samba which provides file and print services for Windows users.
RHEL6 also makes use of multi-queue networking.
The support for kernel-based KVM hypervisor virtualisation is native, up to 64 virtual CPUs on virtualization-enhanced AMD and Intel server platforms.
The machine took three years to be developed.
