New version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 released

Last week the Red Hat developers unveiled the new version of their business-oriented distribution, reaching its version Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7.

The RHEL 7.x branch is accompanied in parallel with the RHEL 8.x branch and will be supported until June 2024. The launch of RHEL 7.7 is the latest in the main phase of full support, which includes functional enhancements. RHEL 7.8 will move into the maintenance phase, where priorities will shift towards bug fixes and security, with minor enhancements related to supporting important hardware systems.

What's New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7

In this new version arrival of full support for the use of the live patching mechanism highlights (kpatch) to eliminate vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel without having to restart the system, which is an excellent proposal to avoid having to stop work. Previously, kpatch was an experimental feature.

Along with this, all architectures have IMA support (Integrity Measurement Architecture) to verify the integrity of files and associated metadata against a database of previously stored hashes and an extended verification module (EVM) to protect the attributes of extended files (xattrs) from attacks aimed at violating their integrity (EVM) will not allow an offline attack, in which an attacker can change metadata, for example, loading from your disk).

Were added lightweight tools to manage an isolated container using a canister set for Buildah, to run - Podman and ready to search images - Skopeo.

As well as the new python3 packages with the Python 3.6 interpreter. Previously, Python 3 only shipped with Red Hat Software Collections. By default Python 2.7 is still offered (the transition to Python 3 was made in RHEL 8).

Display presets have been added to the Mutter window manager for all users on the system (it is no longer necessary to configure display settings separately for each user.

In the graphical installer, definitions have been added to enable simultaneous multithreading (SMT) mode on the system and the output of a corresponding warning.

Full support for Image Builder is provided, a system imager for cloud environments including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform along with the conversion support of the virt-v2v utility.

This is for running KVM-based virtual machines with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) used with non-KVM hypervisors. Increased performance and reliability of VMWare virtual machine conversion. Added support for converting virtual machines using UEFI firmware to run on Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).

SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) provides full support for storing sudo rules in Active Directory. Whereas for new installations to protect against Specter V2 attacks, the default mechanism now uses the Retpoline mechanism ("specter_v2 = retpoline") instead of IBRS.

Of the other changes that stand out in this new release we find:

• The gcc-library package has been updated to version 8.3.1. Added the compat-sap-c ++ - 8 package with a variant of the libntdc ++ runtime library compatible with SAP applications.
• The framework includes the Geolite2 database, in addition to the obsolete Geolite database, which is offered in the GeoIP package.
• The SystemTap trace toolkit has been updated to branch 4.0, and the Valgrind memory debugging toolkit has been updated to version 3.14.
• The vim editor has been updated to version 7.4.629.
• Up to version 1.0.35 updated filter set for cup-filter printing system. The background browsing process has been updated to version 1.13.4. Added a new implicit class backend.
• New graphics and network drivers have been added. Updated existing drivers.

How to get this new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7?

RHEL 7.7 installation images are available for download for registered users only from the Red Hat Customer Portal and are ready for x86_64, IBM POWER7 +, POWER8 (big endian and little endian), and IBM System z architectures.

The source code for the package can be downloaded from the CentOS project's Git repository.