Red Hat tests dual-core support

Red Hat on Friday began testing support for forthcoming dual-core processors in its first update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, software.

Dual-core processors combine two processing engines onto a single slice of silicon, a prevailing method of squeezing more performance out of a processor. Red Hat told customers Friday that the beta version of the first update to RHEL 4 includes support for both Advanced Micro Devices' and Intel's dual-core processors.

IBM pioneered the market with its Power4 processor in 2001, with Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard following suit with their own chips. AMD and Intel are working to make the technology mainstream with dual-core x86 server processors arriving April 21 and early 2006, respectively.

The Red Hat update version also includes an updated IA32 Execution Layer, which lets Intel's Itanium 2 processor run software written for x86 chips such as Xeon. The new update adds support for Intel's forthcoming "Montecito" version of Itanium, reduces memory requirements and boosts performance overall--particularly for Java and mathematical programs, Intel said.

The Red Hat update includes the latest support for Intel wireless networking products.

Red Hat, the top Linux seller, updates its operating system products quarterly.

Just PR...

There's nothing specific to RedHat here.
Dual-core support (in the title but not body of
the article) works very well already, Itanium
support (in the body but not the title) is there
too (though you really need to compile with the
Intel compiler to get any advantage), and the
wireless drivers are supplied by Intel to the
community at large.

I think that the only thing that RedHat is
doing, other than putting out a press release
advertising features of Linux that aren't
specific to RedHat, is that they are stating
that they'll build the associated support as
kernel modules. RedHat has historically done a
poor job about making sure that support for all
Linux-supported hardware was available as a
kernel module (unlike other distributions),
forcing the conusmer to recompile the kernel to
get things like (historically) NTFS read
support, etc.