What’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta

Krishnendhu A
4 min readNov 26, 2021

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 Beta is now available, with a slew of new features and enhancements. RHEL 9 Beta is a preview of the next major RHEL upgrade, based on upstream kernel version 5.14. This release is intended for high-volume hybrid multicloud installations that span physical, on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments.

The following hardware architectures are supported by RHEL 9 Beta:

(x86 64) Intel/AMD64

64-bit ARM (aarch64)

Power LE is an IBM product (ppc64le)

Z (IBM) (s390x)

The RHEL 9 Beta is a departure from prior major RHEL releases. It features fewer modifications that need admins and IT Ops to learn new methods of doing things, despite the fact that it has many improvements and enhancements that customers have requested. Are you familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8)? Then RHEL 9 Beta will make you feel right at home, but with a few additional features and improvements.

RHEL 9 Beta is now available, featuring a plethora of new features and enhancements. Based on upstream kernel version 5.14, RHEL 9 Beta is a preview of the next major RHEL upgrade. This release is designed for large-scale hybrid multicloud deployments that span physical, on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments.

Simplified automation and management

We’re still committed to giving Operations teams the tools and best practises they need to make the most of their most valuable resource: time. In order to achieve this aim, we’re continuing to work on making RHEL easier to automate and scale. The following are some of the new features in RHEL 9 Beta:

Enhanced web console performance metrics — You will be able to better detect the probable reasons of performance bottlenecks if you have access to extra data. We’ve also simplified the process of exporting these data to popular analysis and reporting tools like Grafana.

Kernel live patching via the web console: Is system downtime a concern? You can now use the web console’s power and simplicity to perform live kernel updates.

Streamlined image building — The ability to produce RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images on a single build node, as well as greater support for customised file systems (non-LVM mount points) and bare metal installations, are among the image builder advancements in RHEL 9 Beta.

Enhanced security and compliance

Security is still one of our customers’ top concerns, and RHEL 9 Beta includes a number of features to help you get peace of mind and meet your stringent compliance needs.

Smart Card Authentication through Web Console — Users can utilise the RHEL web console to access remote hosts using smart card authentication (sudo, SSH, etc.).

Additional security profiles — To aid in compliance with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and other regulations. Customers now have access to sophisticated tools to quickly handle compliance concerns at scale when combined with intelligence gathering and remediation services like Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite.

Detailed SSSD logging — SSSD, the built-in enterprise single-sign-on framework, now logs more information about events like job completion time, problems, and the authentication flow, among other things. Admins can now investigate performance and configuration issues using new search features.

Integrated OpenSSL 3 — Use the new OpenSSL 3 cryptographic frameworks to implement the most recent security standards. RHEL utilities have been recompiled to use OpenSSL 3, giving companies new security cyphers to encrypt and safeguard data.

Digital hashes and signatures based on the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) — To detect malicious modifications across your infrastructure, you may now dynamically validate the OS’s integrity.

SSH root password login is disabled — To avoid brute force attacks using passwords, RHEL 9 prohibits users from logging in as ‘root’ using a password.

Improved container development

If you’re working with UBI container images, the RHEL 9 Beta UBI base images are a good place to start. The regular UBI image, as well as micro, minimum, and init images, are all accessible. Test the UBI images on a fully subscribed RHEL 9 Beta container host to get the complete experience, which will allow you to fetch more RPMs from the RHEL 9 Beta repositories.

Cgroup2 is also included by default in RHEL 9 Beta, as well as a recent release of Podman with revised settings for RHEL 9. When fetching container images, users will obtain signature and short-name validation by default (e.g., ubi8 instead of registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi), thus this is a wonderful opportunity to test container-based apps with the “out-of-the-box” setup intended for RHEL 9.

Built in the open and driven by collaboration

This is a pivotal moment for us. RHEL 9 is a significant step forward in Red Hat’s efforts to create a commercial Linux distribution based on CentOS Stream. The CentOS Stream project has enabled us to increase openness in the way we construct the distribution while simultaneously reducing the time it takes to test, stable, and release it. We hope that this will enable our ecosystem to receive a faster response to their contributions, as well as provide our user base with more frequent previews of future RHEL versions. We’re sticking to our open source development strategy.

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