Chapter 11. Installation and Booting Assigning mount points to existing block devices is now possible in Kickstart installations A new mount command is now available in Kickstart. This command assigns a mount point to a particular block device with a file system, and it can also reformat it if you specify the --reformat option. The difference between mount and other storage-related commands like autopart , part , or logvol is that with mount you do not need to describe the entire storage configuration in the Kickstart file, you only need to make sure that the specified block devices exist on the system. However, if you want to create the storage configuration instead of using an existing one, and mount the various devices, then you must use the other storage configuration commands. You can not use mount with the other storage configuration commands in the same Kickstart file. (BZ# 1450922 ) The livemedia-creator utility now provides a sample Kickstart file for UEFI systems The example Kickstart files provided with the livemedia-creator packages have been updated to support 32 and 64-bit UEFI systems. The files are located in the /usr/share/lorax-version/ directory. Note that livemedia-creator must be run on a UEFI system or virtual machine to build bootable UEFI disk images. (BZ# 1458937 ) New option for the network Kickstart command binding the device configuration file to the device MAC address You can now use the new --bindto=mac option with the network Kickstart command to use the HWADDR parameter (the MAC address) instead of the default DEVICE in the device's ifcfg file on the installed system. This will bind the device configuration to the MAC instead of the device name. Note that the new --bindto option is independent of the network --device Kickstart option. It will be applied to the ifcfg file even if the device was specified in the Kickstart file using its name, link , or bootif . (BZ# 1328576 ) New options for Kickstart %packages allow configuring Yum timeout and number of retries This update adds two new options for the %packages section in Kickstart files: --timeout=X - sets the Yum timeout to X seconds. Defaults to 30. --retries=Y - sets the number of Yum retries to Y . Defaults to 10. Note that if you use multiple %packages sections during the installation, options set on the section which appears last will be used for every section. If the last section has neither of these options set, every %packages section in the Kickstart file will use the default values. These new options may help when performing a large number parallel installations from a single package source at once, when package download speed is limited by disk read or network speeds. The new options only affect the system during installation and have no effect on Yum configuration on the installed system. (BZ# 1448459 ) The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ISO image can be used to create guests virtual machines on IBM Z With this release, you can create a bootable Red Hat Enterprise Linux ISO file for KVM virtual machines on the IBM Z architecture. As a result, Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest virtual machines on IBM Z can boot from a boot.iso file. (BZ# 1478448 ) ARPUPDATE option for ifcfg-* files has been introduced This update introduces the ARPUPDATE option for the ifcfg-* files with default value yes . Setting the value to no allows administrators to disable updating neighboring computers with address resolution protocol (ARP) information about current network interface controller (NIC). This is especially needed when using Linux Virtual Server (LVS) Load Balancing with Direct routing enabled. (BZ#1478419) The --noconfig option added for the rpm -V command With this update, the --noconfig option has been added to the rpm -V command. This option enables the command to list only the altered non-configuration files, which helps diagnose system problems. (BZ# 1406611 ) ifcfg-* files now allow you to specify a third DNS server ifcfg-* configuration files now support the DNS3 option. You can use this option to specify a third Domain Name Server (DNS) address to be used in /etc/resolv.conf , instead of the maximum of two DNS servers. (BZ# 1357658 ) Multi-threaded xz compression in rpm-build This update adds multi-threaded xz compression for source and binary packages when setting the %_source_payload or %_binary_payload macros to the wLTX.xzdio pattern. In it, L represents the compression level, which is 6 by default, and X is the number of threads to be used (may be multiple digits), for example w6T12.xzdio . To enable this feature, edit the /usr/lib/rpm/macros file or declare the macro within the spec file or at the command line. As a result, compressions take less time for highly parallel builds, which is beneficial especially for continuous integration of large projects that are built on hardware with many cores. (BZ#1278924)

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