Installation guide

Release Notes

Improvements in Driver Disk Support

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

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

that otherwise would not be recognized. The RPMs are installed on the system and placed into the

initrd so that they are supported when the machine reboots.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, installation can automatically detect the presence of a driver

disk based on its file system label, and use the content of that disk during installation. This

behavior is controlled by the installation command line option dlabel=on, which enables the

automatic search. All block devices with the file system label OEMDRV are examined and drivers

are loaded from these devices in the order in which they are encountered.

iSCSI Boot Firmware Table

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 now fully supports the iSCSI Boot Firmware Table (iBFT) which

allows for booting from iSCSI devices. This support required that iSCSI disks (nodes) are no

longer marked to start up automatically; the installed system will no longer automatically connect

and login to iSCSI disks when entering runlevel 3 or 5.

iSCSI is usually used for the root filesystem, in which case this change does does not make a

difference as the initrd will connect and login to the needed iSCSI disks even before the runlevel is

entered.

However if iSCSI disks need to be mounted on non root directories, for example /home or /srv,

then this change will impact you, since the installed system will no longer automatically connect

and login to iSCSI disks that are not used for the root filesystem.

Using iSCSI disks mounted on non root directories is still possible, but requires the use of one of

the following workarounds:

1. Install the system without use of iSCSI disks mounted on non root directories and later

configure the relevant disks and mount points manually

2. Boot the installed system into runlevel 1, and mark any iSCSI disks that are not used for the

root filesystem for automatic startup by using the following command once per disk:

iscsiadm -m node -T target-name -p ip:port -o update -n node.startup

-v automatic

rhythmbox

the rhythmbox audio player has been updated to version 0.11.6. This update provides the option

to use proprietary GStreamer plugins.

lftp Rebase

lftp has now been rebased to version 3.7.1. This applies several upstream feature updates and

bug fixes, including:

• A security flaw in the way lftp quoted scripts generated by mirror --script (which could

cause unauthorized privilege escalation) is now fixed.

• Using lftp with the option -c no longer causes lftp to hang.

• lftp no longer corrupts files during a transfer when using sftp.

For more information on lftp updates applied in this release, refer to http://lftp.yar.ru/news.html.