The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 kernel includes a new panic_on_io_nmi option (configured via the /proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_io_nmi file). This option allows users to press the hardware or virtual Non Maskable Interrupt (NMI) button, which acts as an I/O error and triggers a crash where otherwise no crash would occur. This can be used in cases when the system is unresponsive and does not accept any commands.

The following kABI symbols have been added to the kernel shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10:

These symbols allow Large Receive Offload to be disabled by the kernel stack.

Red Hat Subscription Manager has been updated to the latest version, which includes the following notable enhancements:

Red Hat Satellite now integrates with Subscription Asset Manager to provide a rich Enhanced Entitlements Reporting interface that maps your purchased products to systems registered within Satellite. The Red Hat Customer Portal now provides subscription manifests for Satellite 5-registered systems, which are imported into Subscription Asset Manager to provide the new reporting features. This manifest file contains information about the subscriptions available in the Satellite 5 entitlement certificate.

Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager is an on-premise subscription management application. It moves the administration of subscriptions and systems away from the Customer Portal and into the local infrastructure. Along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10, a new 1.3 version of Subscription Asset Manager is now available. For more information, refer to the Red Hat Subscription Asset Manager 1.3 Release Notes located at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Subscription_Asset_Manager/.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 includes a new package, redhat-support-tool, which provides the Red Hat Support Tool. This tool facilitates console-based access to Red Hat's subscriber services and gives Red Hat subscribers more venues for accessing both the content and services available to them as Red Hat customers. Further, it enables our customers to integrate and automate their helpdesk services with our subscription services. The capabilities of this package include:

For more information about the Red Hat Support Tool, refer to the installed documentation in the /usr/share/doc/redhat-support-tool-version/ directory or the following Knowledge Base article: https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/445443.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 includes an updated version of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) configuration scanner, OpenSCAP. The new version provides important bug fixes and an authenticated scanner that implements the SCAP 1.2 specification.

The fsfreeze command, provided by the util-linux package, is now fully supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10. fsfreeze suspends and resumes access to a file system. fsfreeze is intended to be used to temporarily suspend file system activity, allowing a consistent snapshot to be created. For more information, refer to the fsfreeze(8) man page.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 provides updated versions, specifically versions 5.1 and 5.5, of the MySQL packages as software collections. In order to migrate from MySQL 5.0 to 5.5, you must first update to MySQL 5.1. Note that the MySQL 5.1 packages are not supported and are provided only for the purposes of migration to MySQL 5.5. You should not use MySQL 5.1 on any of your production systems. For more information on the migration from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.5, refer to chapter Migrating from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.5 in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Deployment Guide at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/.

As a result of this update, Red Hat will not issue any more security advisories for the MySQL 5.0 packages (mysql-5.0.* and related packages). Security advisories will be provided only for MySQL 5.5.

A new gcc-libraries package, which includes the libitm library and a new libatomic library, is now included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9, libitm was a separate package that included the libitm library. The libitm package is now deprecated and replaced by the gcc-libraries package.