Red Hat to announce 2.6 kernel support at LinuxWorld

InfoWorld has a report that Red Hat plans to announce Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0 at the February edition of LinuxWorld in Boston. RHEL 4.0 will be the first version of the product to feature version 2.6 of the Linux kernel -- the same version of the kernel that Novell has been featuring in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 since August of last year. Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel was released in December 2003 and one of its biggest improvements over kernel 2.4 (which dates back to 2001 and is still the kernel behind the current version of RHEL) was in its support for servers with more than eight processors. According to the story, which credits IDG's News Service with the scoop, "version 4 will include a rewrite of Linux's I/O subsystem, which manages the transfer of data between components on the computer, as well as a new version of the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) hard drive partitioning software."
In announcing version 2.6, Red Hat is apparently trying to keep pace with Novell. Stay tuned for my upcoming coverage of Novell's Open Enterprise Server and my interview of Novell's director of product marketing Charlie Ungashick who will get asked some questions about the recent Red Hat development.