Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 beta. It’s the last update in the Full Support Phase of RHEL 7 branch.

Key updates include support for the latest generation of enterprise hardware as well as remediation for the recently-disclosed Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)/ZombieLoad vulnerabilities.

RHEL 7 was released back in 2014 and full support is offered for 5 years, which includes all new features and software functionality.

After that, it moves into the maintenance phase where users continue to get critical and Important Security errata advisories. Users running RHEL 7 won’t receive new software functionality. A maintenance release is supported for another 5 years and after that, there are two years of extended support. In a nutshell, RHEL users get up to 12 years of support.

There is already RHEL 8 which is optimized for cloud-native workloads. Red Hat offers a very smooth upgrade path from one major release to the next. However, most users run a very complex workload and stay on existing release till the end of life.