Technology Previews - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5.4 - TECHNICAL NOTES Manual

Chapter 3.

Technology Previews

Technology Preview features are currently not supported under Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription
services, may not be functionally complete, and are generally not suitable for production use.
However, these features are included as a customer convenience and to provide the feature with
wider exposure.
Customers may find these features useful in a non-production environment. Customers are also free
to provide feedback and functionality suggestions for a Technology Preview feature before it becomes
fully supported. Erratas will be provided for high-severity security issues.
During the development of a Technology Preview feature, additional components may become
available to the public for testing. It is the intention of Red Hat to fully support Technology Preview
features in a future release.
ALUA Mode on EMC Clariion
Explicit active-passive failover (ALUA) mode using dm-multipath on EMC Clariion storage is
now available. This mode is provided as per T10 specifications, but is provided in this release only
as a technology preview.
For more information about T10, refer to http://www.t10.org.
ext4
The latest generation of the ext filesystem, ext4, is available in this release as a Technology
Preview. Ext4 is an incremental improvement on the ext3 file system developed by Red Hat
and the Linux community. The release name of the file system for the Technology Preview is
ext4dev.
The file system is provided by the ext4dev.ko kernel module, and a new e4fsprogs package,
which contains updated versions of the familiar e2fsprogs administrative tools for use with ext4. To
use, install e4fsprogs and then use commands like mkfs.ext4dev from the e4fsprogs program
to create an ext4-base file system. When referring to the filesystem on a mount commandline or
fstab file, use the filesystem name ext4dev.
FreeIPMI
FreeIPMI is now included in this update as a Technology Preview. FreeIPMI is a collection of
Intelligent Platform Management IPMI system software. It provides in-band and out-of-band
software, along with a development library conforming to the Intelligent Platform Management
Interface (IPMI v1.5 and v2.0) standards.
For more information about FreeIPMI, refer to
TrouSerS and tpm-tools
TrouSerS and tpm-tools are included in this release to enable use of Trusted Platform Module
(TPM) hardware.TPM hardware features include (among others):
• Creation, storage, and use of RSA keys securely (without being exposed in memory)
• Verification of a platform's software state using cryptographic hashes
TrouSerS is an implementation of the Trusted Computing Group's Software Stack (TSS)
specification. You can use TrouSerS to write applications that make use of TPM hardware. tpm-
tools is a suite of tools used to manage and utilize TPM hardware.
For more information about TrouSerS, refer to http://trousers.sourceforge.net/.
http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/
283