Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 has already begun its path, not to replace its previous version, whose latest update, RHEL 8.6, arrived recently and which still has a good time of support ahead of it, but as a new base for the corporate operating system and the many tools that revolve around it.
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 was announced at the Red Hat Summit 2022 conference a couple of weeks ago, although it was not until a few days later that the new version of the system was made available to the company’s customers, including installation images and upgrade processes. Although the red hat company does not only have clients as such, now part of IBM.
It is worth remembering in this regard, that of access to the system, that after the end of CentOS, although it is just now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has become based on CentOS, and not the other way around (RHEL 9 this is the first version which is based on CentOS Stream), the company expanded its free planswhich can now be used by development and production teams up to 16 servers, as well as open source organizations without limits.
Regarding RHEL as a development platform attractive, in addition, Red Hat introduced AppStream some time before, an evolution of the Red Hat Software Collections with which to simplify the installation of recent versions of development software, such as programming languages, frameworks and other tools, whose updating or use of different versions concurrently was not always easy on RHEL. Of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 improves AppStream support.
Another detail to take into account for those who consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 as a workstation is its desktop environment and tools, although there are not too many changes in this regard and if with RHEL 8 the distribution made the leap to GNOME Shell and Wayland, in RHEL 9 it is maintained, with the corresponding update: GNOME 40 is the desktop version it has, so the reference would be Fedora 34, available for just over a year, but with Linux 5.14, a slightly more modern kernel. With everything said: after Fedora, everything goes through CentOS Stream.
All in all, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major release, which often means significant changes in focus beyond consolidating previously introduced items, or updating packages and components. Thus, Red Hat expands its commitment to hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge computing with, as we already anticipated, improvements on all fronts: security, optimization, performance, virtualization, in more specific ways, see container management with Podman or live patching of the kernel via the web with Cockpit, to mention a couple of specific new features.
The bulk of the novelties of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is divided into four blocks that the company has presented as the pillars of this new stage:
- Innovate: Ships with GCC 11 (GNU Compiler Collection) and the latest versions of the LLVM, Rust, and Go compilers, allowing developers to continuously modernize their applications. Python 3.9 is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, providing a faster release schedule, performance gains, dictionary union operators, and more consistent and stable internal APIs.
- Optimize– Provides new Image Builder capabilities, including support for bare metal deployments and custom file system configurations to help organizations save time and ensure consistency when deploying and managing systems at scale. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 now offers the Image Builder service to make it easy for organizations to build a standardized and optimized operating system image through our service and deploy it to their cloud provider.
- To protect– Provides improved user authentication logs (via SSSD), web console support for smart card authentication with sudo and SSH (Secure Shell client), disabled root login via SSH by default, and improved SELinux performance . Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also offers an integrated OpenSSL 3 cryptographic framework, an enhanced OpenSCAP profile, and Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) hashes and digital signatures, to help organizations manage security and remain compliant when deploying new systems. or manage existing infrastructures.
- Trust– Delivers improved web console performance metrics, including kernel live patch management via web console, new system roles for Postfix, Firewall, HA Cluster, to make it easier for organizations to automate manual tasks, standardize deployment at scale and simplify day-to-day system administration. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also offers improved scalability of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) and Link Time Optimization (LTO) to help organizations identify, analyze, and optimize the performance of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with confidence.
As always, though, this isn’t just a glimpse of what’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, broken down into the lengthy official release notes. After registration, the download of RHEL 9 is available in different media and by different means.
