Red Hat has announced the beta release of the next major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform. Based on upstream kernel version 5.14, RHEL 9 Beta is designed for demanding hybrid multicloud deployments that range from physical, on-premises, public cloud to edge.

RHEL 9 Beta will run on four different hardware architectures: Intel/AMD64 (x86_64), ARM 64-bit (aarch64), IBM Power LE (ppc64le) and IBM Z (s390x).

It features enhanced web console performance metrics allowing you to better identify the potential causes of performance bottlenecks; Kernel live patching via the web console; and several image builder improvements, including the ability to build RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images via a single build node, better support for customized file systems (non-LVM mount points) and bare metal deployments.

RHEL 9 Beta also delivers a number of capabilities to help you meet your strict compliance requirements. Smart Card authentication via web console, additional security profiles to help achieve compliance with standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and others, detailed SSSD logging, integrated OpenSSL 3, Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) digital hashes and signatures, as well as SSH root password login disabled by default.

RHEL 9 Beta ships with cgroup2 by default and a recent release of Podman with new defaults for RHEL 9.

RHEL 9 Beta also features GCC 11 and the latest versions of LLVM, Rust and Go compilers empowering developers to modernize their applications. Also, Python 3.9 will be the default version for the life of RHEL 9 and bring new features to assist developers build their applications, including timezone-aware timestamps and new string prefix and suffix methods, and dictionary union operations.

All packaging methods in RHEL 9 including modules, SCLs, Flatpaks, and traditional RPMs are included in application streams making them easier to use.