The release of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3 sees the operating system gain scalability parity on all 64-bit systems, with the large SMP kernel variant enabling support for 64 logical CPUs on Intel EM64T and Advanced Micro Devices Inc AMD64 processors.
RHEL 4 on these processors is currently certified to scale to eight processors, the same as IBM Corp’s PowerPC. Making use of the existing smp kernel now enables RHEL on PowerPC to scale to 64- logical CPUs as well.
The company is linings up further extensions, however, with preview code in RHEL 4 Update 3 enabling IA-64 Itanium2 systems to scale to 256 logical CPUs and PowerPC systems to scale to 128 logical CPUs.
More preview code introduces support for the OpenIB InfiniBand software stack, which Linux rival Novell Inc also recently promised to include in the next version of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system.
RHEL 4 Update 3 also includes multi-core support for IA-64 systems, as well as numerous security, system tool, storage, and driver updates.
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