What's next? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 and beyond

Our latest major release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, is here and it's built to help organizations confront the major forces that shape modern enterprise tech. Every organization faces some combination of challenges: maximizing scarce resources, making smart cloud investments, resisting attacks and finding value in the artificial intelligence explosion. RHEL 10 is the foundation for doing it with confidence.

Meeting new demands

Demands on IT are always growing, while the resources (financial, technical, human) stay the same or shrink. Even if the personnel budget is there, new Linux talent may not be—93% of hiring managers struggle finding people with open source skills, according to The Linux Foundation. 

Given the persistent pressure despite Linux talent gaps, it's vital for teams to work up to their potential and for existing systems to work efficiently. RHEL 10 helps on both counts, with new features that simplify Linux management and free teams to focus on innovation.

RHEL Lightspeed

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed is an AI-powered service that uses decades of RHEL-specific expertise to simplify the RHEL experience, RHEL Lightspeed offers proactive guidance that makes building, deploying and managing RHEL simpler for experts and newcomers alike.

Just ask plain-language questions (“Help me troubleshoot SSHD failing to start?”) to our new command line assistant and get straightforward, actionable recommendations.

$ c "Help me troubleshoot SSHD failing to start"
1. Verify that the directory exists and has the correct permissions and ownership:
   `ls -ld /usr/share/empty.sshd`
   If the directory does not exist, or if it exists but lacks the correct permissions (711) or ownership (root:root), proceed to the next step.
2. Create the directory with the correct permissions:
   `mkdir -p /usr/share/empty.sshd
   chmod 711 /usr/share/empty.sshd`
3. Set the correct ownership:
   `chown root:root /usr/share/empty.sshd`
4. Restart the sshd service:
   `systemctl restart sshd.service`
After completing these steps, the sshd service should start successfully. For more detailed diagnostics, you can check the logs in /var/log/secure` for any authentication-related errors.

RHEL Lightspeed powers another new feature that will shortcut a lot of uncertainty: Red Hat Insights image builder package recommendations. Within RHEL, there are thousands of packages that serve useful features and functionality. Most organizations only use a small portion of them, but they could benefit from many more. RHEL Lightspeed analyzes the packages you select in Insights image builder and suggests other relevant ones. 

We've also improved the native RHEL image builder, adding new customizations, better integration with Red Hat Insights services and Insights image builder and support on a range of popular platforms (public clouds, virtual, and bare metal). 

Red Hat Insights planning for RHEL

Traditionally, coordinating and executing changes across sprawling RHEL environments has been time-consuming, sometimes scattered work. With Red Hat Insights planning for RHEL, RHEL 10 addresses that by centralizing critical roadmap and lifecycle information for RHEL minor releases and application streams. 

With tailored views of their systems' current state, sysadmins can anticipate upcoming releases and deprecations so they can make changes at build time, when change is less costly. When visibility into your RHEL estate and our RHEL roadmap is easy to access, you can stay focused on building new experiences, not maintaining the systems that support them.

More RHEL web console functionality

Since its introduction in RHEL 8, the RHEL web console has become popular because it simplifies management tasks. RHEL 10 makes it more powerful with built-in support for management of remote systems that don't have Cockpit packages installed. 

Three more web console improvements you should know about:

• A new text editor as part of the file browser app, so you can find and revise text-based files without ever leaving the console
• Support for configuration of Stratis filesystem size limits, so you can easily set storage limits
• RHEL High Availability Add-On management is now available in the web console, unifying the operational experience for RHEL High Availability customers

New (AIDE) and improved (Podman and systemd) system roles

System roles are sets of Ansible roles and modules that offer stable, consistent interface configurations, and they're designed to make it easier to automate aspects of OS management. RHEL 10 brings a new system role that handles installation and configuration of the popular Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment (AIDE) Linux security tool. The AIDE system role simplifies database initialization and updates, as well as AIDE integrity checks.

The existing Podman and systemd system roles get enhancements in RHEL 10. Podman 5 introduced support for creating pods with the quadlet tool. The Podman system role automates pod configuration with quadlet, making it easier to run Podman with consistency across RHEL environments at scale.

We've also improved the systemd role to add support for systemd user units. Previously, it only supported system units.

Accelerating cloud adoption without sacrificing consistency

We're decades into the era of enterprise cloud computing, and the pressure to embrace its scale and convenience hasn't abated. Optimized for the cloud, RHEL 10 is the ideal operating foundation for working within and across clouds. We've worked with our partners at AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to engineer fully integrated and fully supported RHEL images for each hyperscaler's environment.

These pre-tuned, run-ready images offer:

• Visibility of your RHEL estate from your public cloud dashboard, unifying your overall view of your services.
• Secure boot and image attestation, ensuring your workloads run on current top-down technologies from boot to runtime.
• Cloud management preconfigured for integration with each cloud provider's specific tools.

Unify management and mitigate drift with image mode for RHEL

Containers have emerged as the go-to platform for application innovation. RHEL 10 brings the power of containers to the way you build, deploy and manage your operating system. Image mode for RHEL lets you deploy your OS as a bootc image to your hardware, virtual machine or cloud, and then layer your app on top of it. That's a far less complex operation than traditional packaged deployments, and it gives developers and image maintainers a common experience and total control over their environment. 

By making operating system updates less painful, RHEL 10 also reduces the need for patching, and avoids the resulting drift that often occurs as users tweak standardized configurations and settings.

New tools and features for developers

As with any major new edition, RHEL 10 has been updated to support modern versions of popular programming languages and services for developers:

• PHP 8.3: Argon2 password algorithm support, new error and exception handling classes in the date extension, and the php-pecl-redis6 package for use with Redis and Valkey databases
• NGINX 1.26: Bug fixes, per-server HTTP/2 support, and startup performance improvement for complex configurations
• Git 2.47: Reftable backend for more efficient reference management and scalability, pseudomerge bitmaps for better performance during fetch operations, and incremental multipack indexes for more efficient updates
• Maven 3.9: General fixes and improvements, plus backports from the Maven 4 line
• MySQL 8.4: New password controls for administrators, as well as authentication improvements and backup compatibility with older MySQL versions
• Windows Subsystem for Linux: Support for running RHEL development environments on Windows without VMs

RISC-V developer preview

RHEL 10 gives developers a chance to experiment with RHEL and the emerging RISC-V architecture. We've partnered with SiFive to offer RHEL 10 on their popular HiFive P550 developer board. As use cases continue to arise, this gives organizations a safe, reliable, open source way to see how RISC-V can benefit them.

Resisting attacks today and tomorrow

The clock is ticking on modern cryptography. It's a matter of time until quantum computing makes today's industry-standard encryption techniques obsolete. That's why RHEL 10 is leading the way for post-quantum-capable Linux.

RHEL 10 ships with new quantum-resistant algorithms that enhance confidentiality by enabling key exchange. Expect more algorithms in future releases.

As with every major RHEL release, we've made several other security improvements to help customers combat current threats and meet regulatory requirements.

Streamlined FIPS validation

Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) in the United States requires new validation certificates for all patches common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) to Open SSL, the library that secures network communications. RHEL 10 ships with a new feature that separates CVE remediation from certificate validation, freeing users to maintain compliance with less effort.

Encrypted DNS

In line with a new mandate for all U.S. federal agencies, RHEL 10 supports domain name system (DNS) encryption. This feature prevents bad actors from accessing internal data via DNS lookup requests.

Red Hat Insights advisor in Red Hat Satellite

The new Red Hat Insights advisor in Red Hat Satellite 6.17 service enables customers with isolated or disconnected infrastructure to access decades of Red Hat knowledge. Drawing from knowledge base articles and our work with customers, Red Hat Insights advisor in Satellite offers proactive risk detection and configuration suggestions to help you avoid downtime without sending data off premises. Red Hat Insights advisor in Satellite, which is currently in technology preview, also provides automatic remediation of detected risks and configuration suggestions.

Domain join with Red Hat Insights

Insights users can also save time and improve security with the new domain join feature. Accessed with our hybrid cloud console, this new feature offers integrations that perform discovery back to their identity management server, automating manual tasks that can introduce vulnerabilities. 

Hardware security module support

Separate storage of keys and certificate authority secrets from software with this new RHEL 10 feature. Designed for compliance with a range of regulatory standards, it reduces the attack surface by storing secrets outside the OS on protected hardware. Hardware security module support is currently in technology preview.

RHEL Security Select Add-On

We’re offering customers a new way to customize support for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) fixes. With the Security Select Add-On, subscribers can purchase 10 CVE fixes of their choice, including CVEs that extend past patching Important and Critical CVEs to lesser severity exploits. This gives customers a chance to act on their own assessments of CVE severity, and we think it's particularly useful for those in highly regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, telecommunications and government. The RHEL Security Select Add-on will be available to customers with subscriptions that include RHEL Extended Lifecycle Support or RHEL Extended Update Support starting Q3 CY 2025.

Embracing AI faster and more efficiently

Over the last two years, no technology has reshaped enterprise tech like AI. Across industries, organizations of every size are trying to tap its massive promise while managing its major resource demands.

To keep pace with the AI transformation, our customers need a foundation they can trust. And in a range of ways, RHEL has continued to evolve as that trustworthy cornerstone.

The latest version of the platform is at the core of Red Hat AI, Red Hat’s curated and optimized AI solutions that encompass both Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI). It brings stability to developing, testing and running large language models and is essential to scaling AI-enabled apps into production.

Foundational AI capabilities in RHEL 10

Working with our vast partner and community ecosystem, we've launched two new efforts to help customers quickly find and deploy AI-enabling technologies.

Through our partner validation program, we'll rapidly assess hardware and software for compatibility with Red Hat products and simplify support policies for them. Customers will be able to see validated AI solutions in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

Similarly, the RHEL extensions repository connects customers with trusted developer tools, open source libraries and niche utilities that can help build with speed and reassurance. Packages listed in the repository are ready to run and have passed Red Hat's secure supply chain assessment.

RHEL 10: Ready when you are

This is a new RHEL for a new world, one where we're all challenged with meeting the demands of AI, cloud adoption and security readiness, despite constrained resources. Read the RHEL 10 press release, release notes and documentation or download our datasheet to learn more. Or download RHEL 10 and get started.