Red Hat’s open source specialists released version 8 of the same named Enterprise Linux, RHEL for short. As usual, the new release includes some features that have long been used in Fedora, the major Red Hat-supported community distribution. For RHEL 8, this mainly concerns the so-called application streams or Appstreams, which are to make the software administration more modular.

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In addition to a base operating system that continues to build on RPM packages, there is now a new way to distribute applications. The technology is the next generation of so-called software collections, where certain software such as programming language or databases are updated at a much faster rate than the rest of the system, the company reports. Users have much easier access to current applications.

As a system-wide innovation, RHEL 8 now supports OpenSSL 1.1.1 as standard and therefore also TLS 1.3. In addition, policies that can be created system-wide from a command prompt enable users to set cryptographic standards without having to adjust the policies of individual applications.

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RHEL 8 supports both Java 8 and Java 11, both of which are currently being updated by the community in the context of long-term care. The Linux distribution also supports both Python 2 and Python 3 in parallel. The distributor has decided not to opt for any of the Python versions by default, so users will have to make that choice themselves. In addition, RHEL 8 dispenses with the KDE desktop plasma.

For cloud and enterprise

As you might expect, RHEL 8 also includes some tools to make container handling easier. These include Buildah for creating container images, Podman for managing containers, and Skopeo for locating and distributing containers in corresponding registries. As an advantage of these tools, Red Hat states that they do not run as a central daemon in the system.

Also, unsurprisingly, RHEL 8 includes the new storage tool Stratis, which aims to bring XFS closer to the capabilities of Btrfs and ZFS. As probably most important functions has Stratis for snapshots and so-called storage pools.

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To make RHEL 8 easier to deploy in cloud environments or as part of an application container, Red Hat also provides the so-called Universal Base Image (UBI), which is free to distribute – so far this was opposed to the Red Hat subscription license. If this image and the container based on it are executed on RHEL itself or on Red Hat’s container platform Openshift, customers also receive the usual support for UBI.

Other changes and changes can be found in the announcement in the Red Hat blog.

Source: Red Hat Blog.