Sitting at the heart of every Linux OS distribution is a Linux kernel. When it comes to the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, the issue of which kernel is being used is not a cut and dried answer, however.

Red Hat has announced the release of version 5.5 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a distribution aimed at enterprise customers. In addition to bug fixes released since RHEL 5.4, the latest release of RHEL includes enhancements to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor

The Linux kernel is the beating heart of any Linux distribution. It is a strange and complex beast and to many people somewhat mystical in nature. I intend to shed light on some of that mystical shroud and show how simple and easy compiling a Linux kernel really is.

Here's one from the file of random stuff you see when you put a new machine on the upstream kernel instead of the distro kernel. USB drivers for Linux will be GPL-only with the release of the upcoming kernel 2.6.25.. USB maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman writes: "Over two years ago, the Linux USB developers stated that they believed there was no way to create a USB kernel driver that was not under the GPL. This patch moves the USB apis to enforce that decision."

Red Hat released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, providing memory allocation enhancements to the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. RHEL 5.5 also introduces new storage and WiFi drivers, and supports new AMD, IBM, and Intel processors, says the company.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat today kicked out the 1.2 release of its Enterprise MRG Linux variant for real-time, messaging, and grid computing. Enterprise MRG was launched as an idea in December 2007 in the wake of Novell's roll-out of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Real-Time variant of its SLES server Linux distro a month earlier.

Two weeks have passed since the release of the Linux 2.6.29 kernel that brought Intel kernel mode-setting, the Btrfs file-system, and many other improvements to the Linux kernel. Now though the first release candidate for the forthcoming Linux 2.6.30 kernel is now out in the wild.

A software developer has uncovered a bug in most versions of Linux that could allow untrusted users to gain complete control over the open-source operating system. The null pointer dereference flaw was only fixed in the upcoming 2.6.32 release candidate of the Linux kernel, making virtually all production versions in use at the moment vulnerable.

At the end of 2008, the 2.6.28 kernel surfaced. Subsequently, the merge window for the next release—2.6.29—opened. As the Linux kernel uses a distributed development process, it's not always clear what's coming (or will be integrated) into a given kernel release, but the last two have been interesting.