Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 released

Oct 15, 2014 · 2 min read ·

Yesterday Red Hat released another update of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux major release 6: 6.6. Like for the minor updates before many optimizations and some "technical previews" were implemented.

The changes have been documented well in the release and technical notes:

Beside common kernel driver updates some other interesting customizations were made - I'd like to list some of those:

Installation as Hyper-V second generation VM - e.g. under Windows Server 2012 R2 (*), this also includes new Hyper-V Daemons: Hyper-V KVP (Hyper-V Key Value Pair) Hyper-V VSS (Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service)
Improved support of additional SCSI signals for better hardware change handling using udev (e.g. size changes, thin-provisioning status, adding new LUNs,...)
Implemented a Open vSwitch module for additional Red Hat products, support is only offered in combination with other Red Hat products
For device mapper a caching modul (dm-cache) was introduced (*). This module can use faster drives (e.g. SSDs) as cache for slower storage media - details can be found in the lvmcache manpage
The software packages keepalived and haproxy are now fully covered by the Red Hat support
OpenJDK 8 Java Runtime Environment can be installed optionally (*)
Windows 8-certified touch screens are now supported by hid-multitouch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 is now NSS FIPS-140 Level-1 certified
System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) was optimized for better authentification in combination with Microsoft Active Directory
gdisk - new tool for GPT partitioniing, the "look and feel" is alike fdisk
rsyslog7 - new, overhauled rsyslog version witn improved encryption and external database support (MySQL, PostgreSQL,...). It is recommended to migrate to this most recent version

(*) = technical preview

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 is now available to all Red Hat customers with a valid subscription.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 released

Translations: