[Osiris]

Red Hat salutes Opteron with dual-core happy update

Red Hat has embraced the dual-core age with an update to its server operating system that works with the latest processors from AMD and Intel.

The software maker detailed Update 1 to Enterprise Linux 4 in a mailing list post put out last week. Along with dual-core support, Red Hat added a better "disk dump capability," a new IA-32 execution layer for the Itanium chip, new drivers for the Centrino chip and host of general security updates and bug fixes. The additions apply to all versions of Enterprise Linux 4 for Opteron, Xeon, Pentium, Power, Itanium and mainframe processors.

"This kernel really took some beating," wrote one Red Hat staffer. "There's a number of memory leaks fixed in there which quite a few folks were hitting in production. Bizarrely, plugging those leaks brought out a number of other issues involving the out-of-memory killer, so various VM tweaking had to happen before this was ready to be pushed out. I'm pretty happy with how U1 (update 1) turned out, despite it being a complete mental drain, and total time sink for me personally.

"Already we're working on getting U2 in shape, which should be more of the same, with some extra features thrown in for good measure."

So far, AMD is leading the dual-core x86 pack with its release of a new Opteron back in April. Intel won't have a comparable Xeon until next year. The Unix crowd, of course, has been running on dual-core systems for quite some time now.