The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas discussion group provides a venue for sharing thoughts and use cases and will be used by the Red Hat engineering development groups.

“We welcome all of our customers and partners to participate in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas group and collaborate with other users and Red Hat engineering to make the next version of our enterprise operating system better than ever,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat in a statement.

What do you think of this idea? Do you feel like it will be useful for you to have a way to give direct feedback on the next iteration of RHEL? What do you want to see in the next version?

Also, we’re seeking system admins who are currently using RHEL 6 to give us feedback on the latest released version of the operating system. Please email nmartin@techtarget.com if you would be willing to share your experience.

Follow us on Twitter @LinuxTT

The official company press release says that Beta 2 includes “an updated installer, additional new technologies and resolutions to many of the issues that were reported in the initial Beta.”

There are still many known issues with the Beta 2 version, and it’s hard to quickly ascertain in the release notes what new improvements have been made.

One thing that caught my attention was the improved Samba support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta provides the following significant enhancements to Samba:

• Internet Protocol version 6 support (IPv6)
• Support for Windows 2008 (R2) trust relationships.
• Support for Windows 7 domain members.
• Support for Active Directory LDAP signing/sealing policy.
• Improvements for libsmbclient
• Better support for Windows management tools (mmc and User Manager)
• Automatic machine password changes as domain member
• New registry based configuration layer
• Encrypted SMB transport between Samba client and server
• Full support for Windows cross-forest, transitive trusts and one-way domain trusts
• New NetApi remote management and winbind client C libraries
• A new graphical user interface for joining Windows Domains

If you’ve been playing with the RHEL 6 beta, what are your favorite new features and what do you wish was there?

I spoke with Tim Burke, Vice President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, and he filled me in on some of the details. Red Hat also has posted a blog with extensive product specs for RHEL 6 on their website.

Completely fair scheduler
A couple of weaknesses in Linux that were discussed with the Linux kernel panel at the recent Linux Collaboration Summit are addressed by RHEL 6. At the top of the list is the completely fair scheduler (CFS), with better “awareness” of the hardware topology, which Burke said is increasingly important in today’s systems.

“For systems like Intel’s Nehalem-EX, different pieces of memory are closely associated with different cores,” said Burke. “The cost of memory access is not uniform. [With CFS] I/O devices can be more efficiently accessed by the processor most local to it. It is better able to assign workloads to the optimal set of processors.”

This improved scheduler has been shared upstream, and is now part of the Linux development tree.

“We continue to perform work on improving latency in I/O stack,” said Burke. “We will drive that innovation upstream.”

Huge pages
Transparent huge pages are one of the virtualization improvements in RHEL 6 beta. The huge pages are a way of more efficiently mapping large regions of memory that can be used by applications, said Burke, who said that they have produced up to 20% performance enhancement in some systems.

“Virtual management registers page table entries and maps to a block of memory (4,096),” said Burke. “Memory that is mapping a virtualized guest could easily be 256 GB, so to manage that in 4,096 KB pages can be inefficient. But when you use huge pages, each page table can map up to 2 GB of physical memory.”

Huge pages themselves aren’t new, but in RHEL 5, the system administrator would have to reserve chunks of memory to use huge pages, said Burke.

“In RHEL 6 is ability to automatically manage huge pages, without the system admin having to reserve memory,” said Burke. “It automatically allocates large memory pages for any app that requests large memory allocation. It obviates having to alter application.”

To download the beta and begin testing it out, you can visit the RHEL 6 beta page on Red Hat’s website.