Red Hat Releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Red Hat has released the final of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. RHEL 7 natively supports the up to 500TB scalable xfs file system. Virtualization via containers is also possible and there is support for 40Gbit/s Ethernet.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 runs on Linux kernel 3.10 and includes improvements over RHEL 6 previously found in Fedora 18, 19, and 20. With support for xfs as the default file system, storage volumes of up to 500TB are now possible. In previous versions, the limit was still 100TB.

RHEL also promises to support Ethernet hardware at speeds up to 40Gbit/s. Improvements have also been made to the IP protocols: the implementation of the tcp extension Fast Open promises less latency, together with algorithms such as tail loss probe, early retransmit and proportional rate reduction.

The use of containers is becoming increasingly important in the Linux server world and cloud computing. RHEL 7 aims to respond to this with support for various Linux containers, including the rapidly increasing popularity of Docker. Red Hat also promises that its operating system can better communicate with Microsoft’s Active Directory.

On the desktop, Gnome 3 can now be chosen as the environment, while there is also a classic mode of Gnome with the look-and-feel of Gnome 2. KDE 4 is also available as a desktop environment on RHEL 7.