Posted by Red Hat released the latest version of RHEL May 18, 2022, this release has a planned End of Life date of May 31, 2026
Firsts
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 has many firsts
First to use CentOS Streams as the upstream distro to create RHEL 9
Second is tto enable Link Time Optimization (LTO) to help improve performance by optimizing throughout the whole program, such as inlining function calls between different objects. Since Rust and Clang both use LLVM, improvements can be made even across different languages.
Focus
RHEL 9 primary focus is on hybrid clouds, RHEL 9 isn’t focused on just cloud as RHEL aims to deploy applications and critical workloads faster with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private and public cloud and edge deployments.
To that end RHEL 9 has built upon the RHEL 8 tool modularization by extending using Red Hat Software Collections, Flatpaks and RPMS. Red Hat believes this will help developers gain access to the development tools and libraries they need to assist them in their development efforts.
Security
There are a number of new security features in RHEL 9 among them is the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) collects file hashes and places then in kernel memory they can also be anchored in the TPM. Using the TPM will trigger an alert if any attempt to alter the file signatures takes place.
System Monitoring
Cockpit web console has an improved performance metrics page that helps identify causes of high CPU, memory, disk, and network resource usage spikes.
A Few more Things
RHEL needs a modern CPU architecture to run. Attempting to run RHEL 9 on older hardware may result in unexpected kernel panics like the one I experienced after launching RHEL 9 for the first time on Proxmox 7.2 using the default CPU type. Changing this value to Max solved the problem for me.
RHEL 9 has a commitment to support many architectures from x86_64 v2, to ARM 8.0-A, PowerPC9 and Z series (z14).
Resource Optimization – right sizing RHEL in public clouds, matches load with performance metrics are just a few of the benefits of using RHEL 9
Wrapup
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 brings new tools to help diagnosis problems, better utilize hardware through optimizations while at the same time offering out of the box security features which helps staff detect unauthorized intrusions.