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Chapter 5. General Updates

New package: redhat-access-insights

Red Hat Access Insights is a proactive service designed to enable you to identify, examine, and resolve known technical issues before they affect your deployment. Insights leverages the combined knowledge of Red Hat Support Engineers, documented solutions, and resolved issues to deliver relevant, actionable information to system administrators.
The service is hosted and delivered through the customer portal at https://access.redhat.com/insights/ or via Red Hat Satellite. To register your systems, please follow the latest Getting Started Guide for Insights, which is available at: https://access.redhat.com/insights/getting-started/.

redhat-release-server includes a fallback product certificate

In some scenarios, it is possible to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux without a corresponding product certificate. To ensure that a product certificate is always present for registration, a fallback certificate is now delivered with redhat-release-server.

Increased gPXE retry timeout values

This update increases the retry timeout values used by gPXE to conform to RFC 2131 and the PXE specification. The total timeout is now 60 seconds.

Enhanced maintainability for Linux IPL code

A new version of the zipl boot loader makes inclusion of bug fixes and new features in the boot loader easier.

Improved performance of the dasdfmt utility

The kernel internal handling of format requests has been reorganized and the usage of the PAV feature is now enabled to accelerate format requests. This feature speeds up formatting of large DASDs in use today and prepares for even larger DASDs that are expected to come in the future.

lscss supports verified path masks

The lscss utility on IBM System z, which gathers and displays subchannel information from sysfs, now displays a verified path mask when listing I/O devices.

wireshark supports reading from stdin

Previously when using process substitution with large files as input wireshark would fail to properly decode such input; as of the latest version wireshark now successfully reads these files.

Boot menu in seabios accessible with Esc key

The boot menu in seabios is now accessible by pressing the Esc key. This makes the boot menu accessible on systems such as OS X which may intercept certain functions keys, including F12 which was used previously, and use them for other functions.

wireshark supports nanosecond precision

Previously wireshark only included microseconds in the pcapng format; however, as of the latest version wireshark now supports nanosecond precision to allow for more accurate timestamps.

lsdasd supports detailed path information for DASDs

The lsdasd utility, which is used to gather and display information about DASD devices on IBM System z, now shows detailed path information such as installed and in-use paths.

lsqeth now displays switch port attributes

The lsqeth tool, which is used on IBM System z to list qeth-based network device parameters, now includes switch port attributes (displayed as switch_attrs) in its output.

fdasd supports GPFS partitions

The fdasd utility, which is used to manage disk partitions on ECKD DASDs on IBM System z, now recognizes GPFS as a supported partition type.

ppc64-diag rebase to version 2.6.7

The ppc64-diag packages have been upgraded to upstream version 2.6.7, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version.

Support for OpenJDK 8 added to JPackage Utilities

OpenJDK 8 was added to RHEL 6.6 but system Java applications were not able to be run with it due to lack of OpenJDK 8 support in the jpackage-utils package. This has been resolved, and the RHEL 6.7 jpackage-utils package includes support for system applications to be run with OpenJDK 8.

preupgrade-assistant supports different modes for upgrading and migrating

To support the different operating modes of the preupg command, additional options are now available in the configuration files. This enables the tool to return only the required data for the operating mode selected. Currently only upgrade mode is supported.