Red Hat lines up next Linux shipment

Red Hat plans to ship the next version of its premium Linux product on 28 February, debuting major virtualisation technology but missing an earlier deadline by about two months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 had been scheduled to ship by the end of 2006. However, the company began giving itself scheduling wiggle room in September, when Red Hat released the first Rhel 5 beta. A second beta arrived in November.

Now Red Hat is being more definitive. Chief executive Matthew Szulik, referring to the final version, said in an interview after the company reported its quarterly financial results: "I'm sure we will ship a gold [version] on 28 February."

The delay isn't a major problem for Red Hat, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King. "Making certain that Rhel 5 is thoroughly locked, loaded and debugged before sending it out the door [is] more important in the end than meeting a deadline," he said. And because Red Hat sells software subscriptions, all existing customers get free upgrades, so the company doesn't consider the new version a "revenue event", he added.

One major feature arriving in Rhel 5 is Xen, virtualisation software that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously. The technology's initial advantage is to let administrators load up a server more efficiently but virtualisation in the longer run also holds promise for reliability and flexibility because virtual machines can be moved from one computer to another while running.

Virtualisation has been a feature on higher-end servers for years and has arrived on mainstream x86 machines chiefly through software from EMC's VMware subsidiary. Xen lacks VMware's market power but the open source software is being incorporated as a standard feature of corporate versions of Linux and the x86 version of Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Reworking an operating system's foundation, as "hypervisors" such as Xen require, is necessarily complicated, however, and Red Hat chief technology officer Brian Stevens said maturing and incorporating Xen is the major factor on which Rhel 5 depends.

Rhel 5 is based on version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel - the core of the operating system - compared to 2.6.9 for the current Rhel 4. The software includes new security features to protect against some attacks, plus a "technology preview" of Red Hat's Stateless Linux software to let desktop machines pull data and settings from central servers.

Red Hat's chief competitor, Novell, began shipping Xen in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server months ago but, so far, the company hasn't threatened Red Hat's commercial Linux dominance. A newer threat - Oracle, which announced in October that it will release a free Rhel clone and sell its own support for the software - so far hasn't been a problem.

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com