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Red Hat announced today the general availability for public testing of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta operating system, which brings exciting new features and many improvements.
Powered by the Linux 5.14 kernel series, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta is here to give the community a preview of the next major release of the award-winning and acclaimed Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system for desktop, server and cloud computing.
“RHEL 9 is a bold step towards Red Hat developing a commercial Linux distribution from CentOS Stream.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta introduces enhanced web console performance metrics to better identify various causes that may affect the performance of your systems, along with the ability to export these metrics to popular analysis and reporting tools like Grafana.
This release also comes with kernel live patching via the Web Console, a feature that already landed in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 release, as well as the ability to build Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 images via a single build node, better support for customized file systems, and bare metal deployments.
“We remain committed to providing Operations teams with tools and best practices to make the most efficient use of their most valuable resource – time,” said Red Hat.
On top of that, this release enhances the overall security and compliance of the operating system by delivering new capabilities like Smart Card authentication via Web Console, additional security profiles, disablement of SSH root password login by default, OpenSSL 3 integration, detailed SSSD logging, as well as support for IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) digital hashes and signatures.
Also new is support for the WireGuard VPN technology as a Technical Preview, a new MultiPath TCP daemon (mptcpd) for configuing MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) endpoints without using iproute2, supports for the rhsm command in the Anaconda installer for machine provisioning via Kickstart installations for Red Hat Satellite, along with automatic network activation for interactive installations.
Among the many improvements included in RHEL 9 Beta there’s improved container development for devs who want to build apps with the UBI container images, cgroup2 by default, and a recent release of the Pod Manager tool with new defaults.
Under the hood, users will find some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies, such as GCC 11.2, LLVM 12.0.1, Python 3.9, Rust 1.54, Go 1.16.6, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.34, GNU Binutils 2.35, GDB 10.2, Node.js 16, Perl 5.3, Ruby 3.0, PHP 8.0, Git 2.31, Subversion 1.14, Apache 2.4, nginx 1.20, OpenSSH 8.6p1, Valgrind 3.17, Varnish Cache 6.5, Squid 5.1, MariaDB 10.5, MySQL 8.0, PostgreSQL 13, Redis 6.2, elfutils 0.185, Maven 3.6, SystemTap 4.5, Dyninst 11.0.0, and Ant 1.10.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta is available for download right now from Red Hat’s Customer Portal and it’s supported on the Intel/AMD64 (x86_64), ARM 64-bit (AArch64), IBM Power PC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM Z system (s390x) hardware architectures.
As usual with a beta release, you should keep in mind that some of the features listed above may be incomplete or missing, and that some bugs might be present. As such, please refrain from deploying this beta release on a production machine.
The final release will be supported for the next 10 years with security and software updates.
Image credits: Red Hat (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 2 years ago
