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During the Red Hat Summit 2020 virtual conference that took place online between April 28-29, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2 is here six months after version 8.1 with a dozen of enhancements to the user experience, security, compliance, monitoring, performance, lifecycle management, as well as extended developer support.
One of the major highlights of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 release is the extended security and compliance by implementing new OpenSCAP profiles, namely DISA STIG (draft) and Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC) Essential Eight.
On top of that, RHEL now meets specific organizational needs thanks to its ability to create custom system-wide cryptographic policies. According to Red Hat, these enable users to specify their own permitted ciphers.
The new Udica container tool introduced in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 series is now used to improve the overall security for containerized workloads with custom SELinux policies.
The monitoring capabilities of RHEL 8 were improved by enhancing isolation and resource governance for container runtime processes with cgroup v2, implementing the ability to monitor throughput of Microsoft SQL Server databases in Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 5.0.2, and simplifying monitoring with Red Hat Insights by enabling its activation during the installation process.
RHEL 8 should now work better on x86 Intel and AMD, as well as ARM and POWER platforms thanks to the implementation of tuned profiles. Red Hat says that this would dramatically improve performance on these architectures.
This release also enhances the user experience by streamlining the subscription registration, which is now a step in the installation process. Furthermore, RHEL 8.2 simplifies the upgrades from RHEL 7.8 with in-place upgrade tooling and reduces the time and risk of in-place upgrades with identification and remediation guidance.
Last but not least, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 expands the developer support by including some of the latest development environments, such as GCC 9.1, Python 3.8, Container Tools 2.0, and Maven 3.6. Also, OpenJDK and .Net 3.1 are now present in the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI).
Existing users with a valid subscription can now upgrade their installations to RHEL 8.2 or download the new ISO images through the Red Hat Customer Portal. On the other hand, new customers can download a 30-day evaluation edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 from here, and developers can sign-up for a free Developer Subscription here.
Image: Red Hat
Last updated 4 years ago
