Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 is available through the Red Hat Network systems management and update service and includes a number of core security enhancements, including NX (no execute) support, as well as support for IBM Corp.’s Power5 servers.

Support for NX technology, which prevents the execution of malicious code and protects against buffer overflow attacks, has been extended from Intel Corp.’s Itanium2 processor to cover Intel x86 and EM64T processors, as well as Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s AMD64 platform.

Update 3 also includes support for Exec Shield and PIE (Position Independent Executable) Linux kernel features to protect against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows and other memory data structure overwrite-related security exploits.

Although still based on version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, these and other updates bring to Enterprise Linux many features from the 2.6 kernel, including security features that were not originally slated for inclusion in the product until early 2005.

Meanwhile, the company has also entered into a partnership with enterprise server and service firm Unisys, which at the beginning of August finally adopted the open source operating system to sit alongside or instead of Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 on its ES7000 servers.

At the time Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Unisys said it would support Novell Inc.’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 3 on both the Xeon and Itanium versions of its ES7000 servers.

It has now joined the Red Hat Partner Community and is committed to offering Enterprise Linux 3 across the full line of server products, as well as providing customer support, joint marketing, training and dedicated engineering teams, and the continued development of open source roadmaps.

In addition to supporting Linux for the first time in August, Unisys also announced that it had contributed technology drawn from its Clearpath mainframes that allows Linux running on the ES7000s to be deployed inside dynamic partitions, as well as code for the Linux 2.6 kernel that allows Linux to run on the ES7000s and support its Server Sentinel systems management software.