Installation guide

Release Notes

• If your system has yum-rhn-plugin-0.5.2-5.el5_1.2 (or an earlier version) installed, you

will be unable to upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 through yum update. To work around

this, upgrade your yum-rhn-plugin to the latest version (using yum update yum-rhn-plugin)

before running yum update.

• Previously, anaconda could not access more than 8 SmartArray controllers. In this update, this

issue has been resolved.

• A driver disk, supplied by an OEM, is a single image file (*.img), containing potentially multiple

driver packages and kernel modules. These drivers are used during installation to support hardware

that otherwise would not be recognized by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Once the driver packages

and kernel modules are installed on the system, they are placed in the initial RAM disk (initrd) so

that they are loaded when the system boots.

With this release, installation can automatically detect a driver disk (based on its file system

label), thereby using the content of that disk during installation. This behavior is controlled by the

installation command line option dlabel=on, which enables the automatic search. dlabel=on is

the default setting for this release.

All block devices with the file system label OEMDRV are examined and drivers are loaded from these

devices in the order by which they are detected.

• Existing encrypted block devices that contain vfat file systems will appear as type foreign in the

partitioning interface; as such, these devices will not be mounted automatically during system boot.

To ensure that such devices are mounted automatically, add an appropriate entry for them to /etc/

fstab. For details on how to do so, refer to man fstab.

2.2. PowerPC Architectures

• The minimum RAM required to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 is 1GB; the recommended RAM

is 2GB. If a machine has less than 1GB RAM, the installation process may hang.

Further, PowerPC-based machines that have only 1GB of RAM experience significant performance

issues under certain RAM-intensive workloads. For a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 system to

perform RAM-intensive processes optimally, 4GB of RAM is recommended. This ensures the

system has the same number of physical pages as was available on PowerPC machines with

512MB of RAM running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 or earlier.

2.3. s390x Architectures

• anaconda now supports both ports on CHPID for OSA Express3 cards. The installer will prompt

for the port number in the initial stage of the installation. The value provided for the port also affects

installed network interface startup script. When port 1 is selected, the value portno=1 is added to

OPTIONS parameter of ifcfg-eth* file.

Note

When installing under z/VM, you can add either PORTNO=0 (to use port 0) or PORTNO=1

(to use port 1) to the CMS configuration file to avoid being prompted for the mode.