Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL).
After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren’t in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update.
Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.
Among the updates that I find interesting from a server perspective is an update to BIND 9.7 for DNS, which has improved DNSSEC capabilities. As DNSSEC is now enabled in the root zone of the Internet, the time for all DNS servers globally to be DNSSEC enabled is here.
The other interesting thing to note is that EXT4 finally is fully supported for RHEL 5.x with the 5.6 update. In previous RHEL 5.x releases, EXT4 was considered to be a technology preview. EXT4 offers significant performance and reliability improvements over EXT3. RHEL 6 as well as Fedora 14 already provide full support for EXT4, so it’s great to see this finally land as a fully supported feature for RHEL 5.x users.
