Red Hat Developers recently announced the launch of the new version of the Linux distribution «Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 ″ and even though the RHEL 8.x branch was already released a few months ago, The RHEL 7.x branch is paired with the 8.x branch and will be supported until June 2024.
The release of RHEL 7.8 marked the transition to the maintenance phaseWhere priorities shifted towards bug fixes and security, with minor enhancements related to supporting major hardware systems.
In the announcement of this new version, developers share:
Today we are pleased to announce the latest update to the world's leading enterprise Linux platform with the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8. This version ensures greater consistency
and control through the cloud infrastructure for IT operations teams while
It also provides a set of modern and compatible container creation tools for enterprise application developers.
For those who want to upgrade to a new version, after the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 version, users will have the opportunity to upgrade from Enterprise Linux 7.8.
What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8?
In this new edition, it is mentioned that se completes the first stage of support for the RHEL 7.x branch, which includes the inclusion of functional improvements.
The interface for changing virtual desktops in the GNOME Classic environment has been changed, the switch button has been moved to the lower right corner and is designed as a strip with thumbnails.
Added support for new Linux kernel parameters (mainly related to the control of the inclusion of protection against new attacks in the speculative execution mechanism of the CPU).
For Windows guest systems using ActivClient drivers, the ability to provide shared access to smart cards is implemented.
Besides that the possibility of mounting partitions using the FUSE mechanism has been implemented in the namespaces of the user namespace, which, for example, allows you to use the fuse-overlayfs command in containers without root.
It is also highlighted that samba package has been updated to version 4.10.4, In addition, SELinux allows the launch of a graphical session for the users of the sysadm_u group and the EDAC driver (error detection and correction) was added for Intel ICX systems.
And also experimental support was provided for OverlayFS, Btrfs, eBPF, HMM, kexec, SME, criu, Cisco usNIC, Cisco VIC, Trusted Network Connect, SECCOMP to freewan, USBGuard, blk-mq, YUM 4, USB 3.0 to KVM, Non-IOMMU to VFIO, converting Debian and Ubuntu images via virt-v2v, OVMF, systemd-importd, DAX to ext4 and XFS.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- An implementation of the SHA-2 algorithm has been added, optimized for IBM PowerPC processors.
- OpenJDK added support for encryption using elliptic secp256k1 curves.
- Full support is provided for Aero SAS adapters (mpt3sas and megaraid_sas drivers).
- The limit on the number of IPC identifiers (ipcmin_extend) has been increased from 32 thousand to 16 million.
- Provides full support for Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA).
- Added a new "storage" role (RHEL System Roles), which can be used to manage local storage (file systems, LVM volumes, and logical partitions) using Ansible.
- Added DIF / DIX (data integrity field / data integrity extension) support for some host bus adapters (HBAs). Qlogic HBA adds full support for NVMe / FC (NVMe over Fiber Channel).
Finally if you want to know more about it about the changes of this new version, you can check the details In the following link.
How to get this new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8?
The RHEL 7.8 installation images are available for download only for registered users of the Red Hat Customer Portal and are prepared for the x86_64, IBM POWER7 +, POWER8, and IBM System z architectures.