CentOS Stream rolls out Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 Beta
This latest RHEL is based on the controversial CentOS Stream Linux distribution. CentOS have become RHEL’s upstream rather than a Linux distro in its own right, RHEL 9 shows that the new CentOS model has delivered what the company wanted from it.
RHEL 9 is based on Linux kernel 5.14 and will be run on four different architectures: Intel/AMD64 (x86_64); ARM 64-bit (aarch64); IBM Power LE (ppc64le); and IBM Z (s390x). RHEL 9 will also run with Mac M1 processors.
Features included in this release:
- Smart Card authentication: Users can make use of smart card authentication to access remote hosts through the RHEL web console (Sudo, SSH, etc.).
- Additional security profiles: You can improve your security intelligence gathering and remediation services such as Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite with security standards such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA.
- Detailed SSSD logging: SSSD, the enterprise single-sign-on framework, now includes more details for event logging. This includes time to complete tasks, errors, authentication flow, and more. New search capabilities also enable you to analyze performance and configuration issues.
- Integrated OpenSSL 3: RHEL 8 supports the new OpenSSL 3 cryptographic frameworks. RHEL’s built-in utilities have been recompiled to utilize OpenSSL 3.
- Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA): Digital hashes and signatures. Lets you dynamically verify RHEL’s integrity to detect rogue modifications across your infrastructure.
- SSH root password login disabled by default: By default, RHEL 9 won’t let you ssh into your server with root passwords.
Other new features include:
- Enhanced web console performance metrics: Access to additional information will allow you to identify the potential causes of performance bottlenecks better. Now it is easier to export these data to leading analysis and reporting tools like Grafana.
- Kernel live patching via the web console: Live kernel updates can be applied from the web console.
- Streamlined image building: There are several image builder improvements in RHEL 9 Beta, including the ability to build RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images via a single build node, better support for customized file systems (non-LVM mount points), and bare-metal deployments.
- Build Universal Base Image (UBI) containers: You can create them not only with standard UBI images but with micro, minimal, and init images as well. To do this, you’ll need a fully subscribed RHEL 9 Beta container host. This enables you to pull additional RPMs from the RHEL 9 Beta repositories.
- RHEL now uses cgroup2 containers by default: Podman, Red Hat’s drop-in daemonless container engine replacement for Docker, uses signature and short-name (e.g., ubi8 instead of registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi) validation by default when pulling container images.
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