What's New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 and 8.10

Fresh off Red Hat Summit in Denver, I ran this live product-update webinar, slide decks and all, on RHEL 9.4 and 8.10. Alongside the release features there was a pile of Summit announcements to unpack, so we covered technical bits, offering updates, and the timelines you need on your calendar.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• Image mode could change how we build systems. I’m genuinely excited about it: you build a full RHEL install as a bootc bootable container, run system roles and configs against it like any container, push it to a registry, then deploy the exact same image to bare metal, VMs, or cloud through your CI/CD pipeline.
• New Ansible system roles keep landing. My top pick this release is the bootloader system role, since the boot countdown clock is the thing I fiddle with most, plus new roles for LVM snapshots and fapolicyd, all driven from a dozen lines of YAML across your whole fleet.
• Techmageddon 2024 is a real date to know. I walk through the life-cycle cliff: CentOS Linux 7 ends June 30, RHEL 6 ELS ends June 30, RHEL 7 moves into ELS, and RHEL 8 shifts to maintenance around June 1, while RHEL 9 stays in full support through 2027.

There’s a lot packed in here, from ARM64 virtualization going GA to YubiKey passkey login and a first look at RHEL Lightspeed.