Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.9. This is the last RHEL 7 minor release as RHEL 7 enters the Maintenance Support 2 phase.

The open source giant introduced RHEL 7 into the market more than six years ago. RHEL 7 paved the way for the refined innovation of RHEL 8, and the company is looking forward to deliver “the next wave of Linux breakthroughs” in the future!

RHEL 7.9 is supported with kpatch which enables IT teams to update their RHEL 7 kernels “live” without requiring a system restart.

It also includes a security content automation protocol (SCAP) profile for the Center for Information Security (CIS) benchmark as well as other selected bugfixes.

As RHEL deployments are tied to a subscription and not to a specific version, RHEL 7.9 also includes straightforward access to in-place upgrades with LEAPP, a command-line interface (CLI) that takes much of the complexity out of upgrading production Linux systems.

RHEL 7 will be maintained until June 30, 2024 as per the RHEL lifecycle policy.