Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4: Cloud focus and updated base

Red Hat has released version 9.4 of the professional Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new version has been generally available since the beginning of the month. It offers a "flexible, reliable, secure and stable basis for innovative applications". RHEL 9.4 is a platform for "faster and more efficient development for critical applications with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private and public cloud and edge deployments".

At least that's what the developer department writes in its blog post on the new Red Hat release. Naturally, they also highlight the numerous updated programming languages and associated databases. Python has been updated to version 3.12, Rubi 3.3, PHP 8.2, MariaDB 10.11 and PostgreSQL 16. Go has also been updated to version 1.21, Rust to version 1.75 and LLVM to version 17.

Improved security

In the area of security and compliance, control over security guidelines has been improved, especially when rolling out new systems and managing existing infrastructure. The image builder now allows FIPS-compliant RHEL for Edge images to be built. RHEL for containers has made significant gains in terms of administration and security, the developers write. This includes the use of Podman 4.9 or the replacement of BoltDB with SQLite.

Identity Management (IdM) has also been expanded. Existing IdM users can be linked to external identity providers (IdPs, Identitiy Providers) that support OAuth2 device authentication. These include the Red Hat version of Keycloak, Azure Entra ID, Github, Google and Facebook.

In the general announcement, Red Hat emphasizes that RHEL for ARM is now available to complete the RHEL platform portfolio. Red Hat emphasizes the lower power consumption and lower operating costs of the ARM architecture, in addition to higher uptime and more predictable performance. RHEL 9.4 offers virtualization for ARM64 hosts and guest systems that use a kernel with 64k pages. This means that virtualization can now be used for ARM64, x86 and IBM Z host architectures. However, hardware certification is still in progress.

The infrastructure configuration is now more consistent. As part of Red Hat Insights and RHEL subscriptions, the image builder can be used to set up more consistent RHEL hosts as it supports Standardized Operating Environments (SOE). A proactive guide for the Insights Image Builder will be released soon, providing recommendations and further information. The Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Virtual Assistant provides guidance on creating, customizing and deploying images in public cloud environments.

Red Hat also mentions that automation in the enforcement of standard roles should help to improve security: vulnerability handling and the implementation of security policies can be automated with the system roles. Integration with Microsoft's Active Directory offers greater efficiency through the integration of dynamic DNS updates. RHEL 9.4 also supports passkey authentication. The developers have tested and verified this with Yubikeys.

Complete overview

The detailed release notes provide in-depth information on the changes in RHEL 9.4 without a particularly narrow focus for developers or with regard to IT security. Customers with a valid subscription can download the new version after logging into their user account.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 was released a year ago. New features included the improved image builder, more edge features and countless bug fixes.

(dmk)