With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.0 as the main news of the last few days, we first make a brief space for the preview, RHEL 8.6 and its main derivativesWell, because Red Hat already has a new major version of its operating system ready, it does not mean that the previous one goes down in history. Nothing is further from reality.
The truth is that many users, especially corporate users, not only, given that RHEL is freely available with limitations (without limitations for open source organizations) and that derivatives are beginning to gain ground in certain segments, all Due to the hasty disappearance of CentOS, they will continue to use the current version, whose support still has years to go.
Thus, because support is maintained and planning a major update is not as simple as it seems depending on the environment, but also because RHEL 8.6 arrives with a good number of changes under its belt, we dedicate this space prior to a release that will be taken over by a variety of channels, before RHEL 9 itself. Like RHEL 9, in fact, we’ve known the highlights for weeks.
What’s new in RHEL 8.6 include security enhancements such as Smart Card Authentication support with Sudo and SSH, or more specific to SAP HANA, including new system roles for automation and official SELinux support; others automation enhancements for Firewall, HA Cluster and the web console; and Stratis Storage support in the web console as a technical preview.
More new to RHEL 8.6 includes updates to many packages, notably new versions of tools and programming languages: Perl 5.32, PHP 8.0, LLVM, Rust or Go are some of the examples that AppStream, Red Hat’s developer service, feeds off of.
This is a summary of the highlights, although naturally, after six months of development, the changes that RHEL 8.6 brings are many more. They are all detailed in the release notes for this version.
We will make it brief and take advantage of the time to collect right here the releases of the main derivatives of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the oldest Oracle Linux, as well as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, two of the best positioned. In essence, they all share the same basic news as RHEL 8.6, with some exceptions in one direction or another, since the derivatives also usually include, to a lesser extent, their own changes. For more data:
