RHEL in Development | RHEL Presents Ep. 68

This is a topic close to my heart: how the RHEL sausage gets made. Brian Smith and I are joined by two guests who happen to be our leadership, Mike McGrath, VP of core platforms, and Gunnar Hellekson, VP and GM for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We get into what Red Hat Enterprise Linux actually is, how the upstream-first ethos works in practice, and why you can’t have RHEL without Fedora and CentOS Stream feeding into it.

A few things worth carrying away from the conversation:

• RHEL, CentOS Stream, and Fedora are one pipeline, not separate islands. As I like to say, you can’t have RHEL without Fedora and CentOS Stream, and this episode traces how work flows from the community upstream into the enterprise product.
• The Halloween release is part of Red Hat’s DNA. Gunnar reminded us that Red Hat Linux first shipped back in 1994 around Halloween, and that cadence still shapes when a new RHEL lands each fall.
• Upstream-first is a culture, not just a policy. Mike and Gunnar make clear this is core to who Red Hat is, and hearing it straight from the people who lead RHEL development brings that ethos to life.

If you want to understand where RHEL comes from, this is the conversation to start with.