Announcing the Beta releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2

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Today, we’re pleased to announce the release of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 8.8 and 9.2 Beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides a flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation. Organizations can deploy applications and critical workloads faster with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private cloud, public cloud, and edge deployments.

What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2 Beta
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2 Beta have new features and enhancements that deliver a more security-focused and consistent foundation for an open hybrid cloud environment with the ability to deliver workloads, applications, and services in less time with less effort across various environments.

Accelerate application development
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2 Beta provide developers with enhancements to application streams with new compilers, runtime languages, databases, and web servers. Further improvements in this release include the following:

  • Python 3.11 is a new version of Python that has several new features and significantly quicker performance.
  • New versions of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) are equipped with new analysis tools and Grafana data visualization platform.
  • Nginx 1.22—a newer version of Nginx, the high-performance, lightweight web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer—now includes OpenSSL 3.0 compatibility, which hardens against request smuggling and cross-protocol attacks, along with Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN).
  • PostgreSQL 15—a new version of the popular open source database—has new security features and a significant performance speed-up.
  • Updates have been made to Rust v1.66, Go v1.19, and LLVM v15 toolsets.

Make it easier to automate and standardize systems
Automation and management capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2 Beta continue to help organizations reduce the complexities of automating manual tasks, standardizing deployments, and simplifying the day-to-day administration of systems. New capabilities include:

  • Web console

    • Provide holistic configuration with network-bound disk encryption (NBDE) on root file systems using the web console.
    • Add a virtual watchdog device to virtual machines (VMs) and eject and insert ISO images within virtual CD-ROM devices running on VMs. Additionally, the web console will now set the discard attribute to "unmap" for newly created VM virtual disks, which allows discard requests to pass to the file system.
    • Select frequently used combinations of policies and sub-policies for system-wide crypto policies. System-wide crypto policies ensure that the cryptographic configuration on all supported services configured for a host is reasonable and follows industry and site-specific security policies.
    • Add or remove groups from user accounts. The account page now provides a new list view that includes groups and the ability to search and sort.
    • Detect and use the system's dark mode setting, which users can override if needed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles

  • The new Podman RHEL system role lets customers automate the deployment of containers in their environment to save time and improve consistency.
  • The new journald RHEL system role lets customers automate the configuration of the systemd journal on RHEL, including the ability to configure a persistent systemd journal.
  • The new ad_integration RHEL system role helps users automate the process of directly integrating RHEL systems with Microsoft Active Directory.
  • Several RHEL system roles—including metrics, nbde_server, vpn, microsoft.sql.server, ha_cluster, logging, postfix, and cockpit—are now able to optionally call the firewall and/or Security-Enhanced Linux system roles to open a port and configure port labeling automatically.
  • The ha_cluster, logging, Microsoft SQL Server, and cockpit RHEL system roles can now call the certificate system role to create a corresponding certificate.
  • The Microsoft SQL Server RHEL system role now provides operational efficiencies, fortifications for disaster recoveries, and support for the newest Microsoft SQL Server release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder
The on-premise version of image builder includes many new security and system configuration options to create highly customized images like:

  • Security configurations

    • Apply OpenSCAP security policy profiles
    • Onboard a FIDO device for secure provisioning of edge devices

  • System configurations

    • Import and export blueprint files
    • Append kernel boot parameters
    • Enable or disable services
    • Enable or disable firewall rules for ports and services
    • Define users and groups
    • Define SSH public keys for remote access
    • Define time zone and time servers
    • Define language and locale
    • Define installation device
    • Define URL to ignition files for an additional zero-touch provisioning method for edge systems

Containers and universal base image (UBI)

Podman provides an open source tool for developing, managing, and running containers on Linux systems. New capabilities include:

  • Container creation auditing. This offers Podman event tracking, allowing container creation events for audit. Container creation auditing is practical for environments with system activity auditing requirements.
  • Custom health check actions via Podman. This provides organizations automation options when a container becomes unhealthy, which is crucial for services in remote locations or critical systems.

Red Hat customers can directly access Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and 9.2 Beta from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product page.

Additional resources

For more information, see the following additional resources:

  • Product
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux