Along with the beta of the Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 2.2 platform, Red Hat also released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 GA.
The new version of KVM included in the operating system introduces support improvements for the PCI passthrough technologies (AMD IOMMU and Intel VT-d) and two new features:
- Support for guest OS management through the Cluster Suite
- Support for Hugepages (4MB pages supported by Intel and newest AMD CPUs, also known as Page Size Extension)
The most interesting addition anyway is related to the SPICE components needed by the Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD) that just appeared in RHEV 2.2.
The RHEL 5.5 release notes raise some doubts about the maturity of the remoting protocol:
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These components, are for use in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products and are not guaranteed to have a stable ABI. The components will be updated to synchronize with functional requirements of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products. Migration to future releases may require manual operations on a per-system basis.