Red Hat has released the eighth update to RHEL 4. The new version sports improved virtualisation performance and scale, with optimised device drivers for RHEL 4 virtual guests deployed on the KVM hypervisor that's supposed to be included in future RHEL 5 releases, apart from virtual guest support for up to 256 disk devices (increased from 16). It also has improved Windows interoperability and file system support due to numerous Samba enhancements; performance improvements due to three new 'kernel tunables' that allow users to optimise application performance by reducing latency and improving utilization; and enhanced developer support with an updated GNU Compiler Collection that allows users to compile applications on RHEL 4 with compatibility with RHEL 5. This helps them prepare for moving applications to the newer Red Hat releases.