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Red Hat launched today Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 as the latest update to their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system series to bring a wide range of new features and enhancements, and support for the latest GNU/Linux technologies.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 comes six months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and it’s here with new security features to mitigate potential risks across the hybrid cloud. These include support for Smart Card Authentication with sudo and SSH in the Web Console for performing administrative functions and accessing remote hosts, support for SAP HANA in production with Red Hat and SAP, and support for drop-in configuration files to OpenSSH servers.
It should be noted the fact that the SAP HANA database management system is now supported by SELinux, the fapolicyd framework, and the Policy-Based Decryption (PBD) for automated unlocking of LUKS-encrypted drives. In addition, fapolicyd have been updated to version 1.1 with support for new rules.d/ and trust.d/ directories, support for the fagenrules script, as well as new options for the fapolicyd-cli command.
Furthermore, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 introduces a new --checksum option to the semodule command to allow users to verify the versions of installed SELinux policy modules, and upgrades both the SCAP Security Guide (SSG) and OpenSCAP packages to versions 0.1.60 and 1.3.6 respectively.
Other new features include initial support for Stratis Storage in the Web Console to allow users to create, configure and manage Stratis Storage pools and filesystems, the ability to passthrough USB and host PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) devices to virtual machines using the Web Console, a new High Availability (HA) Cluster System Role for automated tooling, and a new system role to automate the installation and configuration of the Web Console.
A new firewall system role is present as well in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 to provide organizations with the ability to automate the management of their firewall configuration, along with system roles for SAP day-1 automation to offer users automated Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform setup and configuration procedures for SAP HANA environments.
Last but not least, RHEL 8.6 is here to simplify the edge installer in an attempt to further ease the administrative burden when deploying remote systems in the field or at a centralized location, add support for the FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO) security standard for devices, add default health checks to test network functionality via Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s intelligent rollback framework, and add edge management to further help organizations manage and scale deployments with better security at the edge.
As expected, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 ships with an updated toolset that includes GCC 11, LLVM 13.0.1, Rust 1.58.1, Go 1.17.7, Perl 5.32, PHP 8.0, OpenJDK 17, Apache Log4j 2, and many other GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies. For more details, check out the release notes.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 is available today for all customers with an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription from the Red Hat Customer Portal. If you don’t have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and you just want to try Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can download the 60-day evaluation edition from here.
Image credits: Red Hat
Last updated 2 years ago
