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.