This week the Red Hat Summit 2020 event was held and although the current situation has forced its online broadcast, news has not been lacking, including the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, the new version of the operating system on which the rest of the company's software and services.
This new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the first in 2020, but it will not be the last, since the arrival of RHEL 8 last year, there are two annual updates that the system will receive. The approach is therefore slightly modified and what to expect from now on are incremental updates, rather than deep changes from one version to another.
In other words, the novelties brought by RHEL 8 remain in the base, which does not mean that a large number of changes are not introduced in RHEL 8.2.
Most notable, simplifying the upgrade process from RHEL 7. Although the distribution has an extensive support period of ten years with the possibility of expansion, Red Hat wants to make it a little easier for its customers, and for this, they have implemented a new update tool available as of RHEL 7.8.
RHEL 8.2 also simplifies the registration of subscriptions, including it as a section in the system installation process; The same is true for monitoring with Red Hat Insights by enabling system activation during installation. The objective of these changes is that the set-up of the system is as immediate and simple as possible.
The rest of the news of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 is divided into three blocks:
Monitoring and performance:
- Improved isolation and resource governance for the container process runtime with cgroup v2.
- Improve performance with specific tweaks for x86 Intel and AMD, ARM and Power architecture with custom profiles.
- Monitoring the performance of Microsoft SQL Server databases in RHEL with Performance Copilot (PCP) 5.0.2.
Security and compliance:
- Improving the security of container workloads with custom SELinux policies with the new Udica container tool.
- It meets specific organizational needs with the ability to create custom system-wide cryptographic policies that allow users to specify
- their own allowed encryption methods.
- Extending security and compliance with the new OpenSCAP profiles - DISA STIG.
Extended developer support:
- New programming language options through application flow including GCC Toolset 9.1, Python 3.8, Maven 3.6, and Containers Tools 2.0.
- The latest versions of development environments, including OpenJDK and .Net 3.1 in Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI), available in the Red Hat Container Catalog along with RHEL 8.2 base images.
With respect to this last section, a good part of all the technologies aimed at the development are available through AppStream, one of the most interesting novelties brought by RHEL 8, according to which it should be remembered that although Red Hat Enterprise Linux was Distributed by subscription, it is possible to access it completely free as long as it is used as a development platform.
So far the most outstanding, although as usual, RHEL 8.2 comes with many changes in the mentioned areas and in others.
Apart from the software, the most notable novelty of RHEL 8.2 is that it is the first version in many years without Jim Whitehurst at the helm of the company. The purchase of Red Hat by IBM has not led to hardly any technical changes, but in human terms, it sponsored the executive to the dome of the blue giant as the new president of IBM, so it didn't take long for him to hand over the red hat to Paul. Cormier, new CEO of Red Hat. You will be missed, because Whitehurst is, in addition to being a high-flying executive, a true Linux player. It is not a usual profile.
0 Comments