| CentOS 5.2 ships with enhanced virtualization |
Jun. 26, 2008
 The CentOS development team has released CentOS 5.2, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2. Available for i386 and x86-64 architectures, the release offers new drivers and bug fixes, as well as improvements to the Xen virtualization kernel, says CentOS.
One of the most popular of the Red Hat clones, CentOS was rev'd to version 5.0 about a year ago. The distro is described as a "100 percent-compatible" rebuild of RHEL designed for those who need the stability of an enterprise-class operating system without the cost of certification and support.
Like the RHEL 5.2 upgrade released a month ago, CentOS 5.2 updates the core Xen virtualization hypervisor to version 3.1.2, and improves its support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures. Version 5.2 supports virtualization of systems with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, and adds CPU frequency scaling support for more power-efficient virtualized processes. The upgraded virtualization is also said to improve clustering capabilities, along with a newly enhanced application failover support.
Version 5.2 also adds improved WiFi support as well as updated support for open source software such as Gnome, KDE, and OpenOffice. Currently, the release is limited to i386 and x86-64 systems. Support for PowerPC, IA64, and Sparc systems will be released soon, says the group.
Whereas RHEL 5.2 added enhanced support for hardware architectures covering IBM System zSeries, the CentOS 5.2 release notes state that, "After lots of rumours, talks, elongated and sometimes emotional discussions we have decided to not support the upstream Z-series of sub-sub-releases." The notes go on to say that is primarily due to lack of time and resources, and others in the open source community are welcome to take the job upon themselves.
All upstream repositories have been combined for easier upgrades. Upgrading from version 5.0 or 5.1 requires only a "yum upgrade," says the group. Users of earlier versions are advised to perform a fresh install.
More information and download instructions for CentOS 5.2 should be available here.
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