Red Hat Network (RHN) FasTrack
Red Hat provides early access to production-ready content that
is scheduled for inclusion in upcoming minor release of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and Advanced Platform.
In Red Hat's software maintenance model, Errata are provided in
consolidated minor releases, which are released approximately every six
months. Minor releases include support for new hardware, device driver
and software package fixes, and new product ISO images. In response to
popular demand, Red Hat has launched a new optional offering for all RHN
subscribers that provides earlier access to certain Errata: RHN
FasTrack.
RHN FasTrack is available as an option to all Red Hat customers who have
active subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Advanced Platform
associated with their Red Hat Network accounts. It is implemented as an
additional child-channel in RHN and can be activated for individual
systems by subscribing them to that channel.
All content of the RHN FasTrack channel is quality assured and ready for
production use. The primary advantage for customers is earlier access to
non-critical errata and updates in smaller units rather than large
updates. Critical infrastructure components such as the kernel, glibc,
gcc, etc. require a full beta testing cycle, and as such, are not
published via FasTrack. In general, if the nature of a package and fix
is not considered of high risk to the distribution as a whole and there
is a low number of other packages in the distribution which rely on the
package, it is a good candidate for FasTrack.
Systems not subscribed to RHN FasTrack will continue to receive the
errata within the regular Updates, and security and critical bug fixes
will continue to be delivered via the regular RHN channels. RHN FasTrack
does not imply any changes for customers who do not wish to use it.
Satellite customers that wish to use RHN FasTrack should contact Red Hat
Support Services to receive an updated Satellite certificate.