What is the Difference between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9?

Those in the tech field are always hearing about Red Hat and how many live it has changed for the better. How what exactly is Red Hat all about and what is RHEL? Why is Red Hat such an integral part of the tech world and what are the services/ products offered by it?

This blog will explore its newest update – RHEL 9 and put it in comparison with RHEL 8. But before we get into all that, here is a brief about what does RHEL mean and the we will move ahead to what is the difference between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9.

 

What does RHEL - Red Hat Enterprise Linux Mean?

Red Hat designed a Linux-based operating system for businesses named RHEL, which stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL has the ability to work on multiple platforms including cloud, desktops, hypervisors and servers.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is amongst the world’s foremost enterprise Linux platforms, has hundreds and thousands of software and hardware vendors, and is certified on millions of clouds. One can purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support specific use cases such as SAP Workloads or edge computing. Every subscription comes with a wide array of benefits, including –

 

• Supported Architectures –

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one such platform that can be optimized to tread on high- performance workstations or servers, along with supporting a huge range of architectures and hardware such as ARM, IBM LinuxONE, x86, IBM Z, and IBM Power.

This becomes possible thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux’ rooted connection with hardware partners and upstream communities. Thus, a reliable platform is born for multiple use cases as well as a consistent application environment spread across cloud, physical and virtual environments.

• Automation & Management –

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you get a stable and consistent administrative experience that allows the admins to give more time to innovative activities and spend an equally less amount of time on error-prone and repetitive tasks.

Red Hat Insights is a major part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it is a managed service for remediation and analytics delivering consistent vulnerability alerts along with targeted guidance. This allows the organization in maximizing their uptime while avoiding emergencies.

Red Hat Smart Management is an add-on with the help of which the remediation process can be automated.

• Install & Migration Tools -

You need the right tools and utilities to help you from the very initial steps of installing, upgrading or migrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux to finally going up to deploying it across various clouds, and that is what you get here. No matter which platform you are coming from, migration tools will make the transition easier for you.

• Security & Compliance –

Mitigating risks, automating security and maintaining compliance was never as simplified as this. Red Hat Enterprise Linux composes of multiple built-in security features including security standard certification, a trust- worthy software supply chain, live kernel patching and security profiles to aid keeping up with this era’s compliance expectations and high security.

• Consistence Performance –

The right tools will aid you optimize your systems and that is made possible with tracing, analysis tools, and comprehensive performance monitoring, and all of this works irrespective of which workloads or hardware you are running.

Now that we have established what is Red Hat Enterprise Linux and what are the benefits that comes along when you get its subscription, it is time to move onto the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL 9.

 

What is RHEL 9? What is the difference between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9?

All Red Hat lovers got a reason to rejoice recently when Red Hat announced the general release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 or RHEL 9. This latest addition is a perfect amalgamation crafted in such a manner so as to strike a balance to fulfil the requirements of a hybrid cloud environment as well as be gamely deployed from the edge to the cloud.

Given its features, RHEL 9 is known to efficiently be provisioned as a guest machine on a physical server, can be run as a container that is built from Red Hat Universal Base Images aka UBIs, on a hypervisor akin to KVM and VMware.

In a line similar to RHEL 8, RHEL 9 is also freely available as a fragment of the Red Hat Developer program subscription.

Instead of getting into just the difference between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9, let us explore some of the finest features of RHEL 9 along the way as well.

 

• Offers Support to the Newer Versions of Programming Languages –

RHEL 9 provides a lot of new versions of dynamic programming languages including Node.JS 16, Python 3.9, PHP 8.0, Perl 5.32, and Ruby 3.0.

Subversion 1.14 and Git 2.31 are the provided version control systems.

Varnish cache 6.6 and Squid 5.2 are the proxy caching servers that are now available.

You the MariaDB 10.5, Redis 6.2, MySQL 8.0, and PostgreSQ 13 are the database servers that you are getting.

Glibc 2.34, GCC 11.2.1, and binutils 2.35.2 are the compilers and the development tools available.

Go Toolset 1.17.1, Rust Toolset 1.58.1 and LLVM Toolset 13.0.1 are the compiler toolsets that are provided.

• Updated GNOME Version 40 –

RHEL 9 is here with GNOME 40, which is a huge leap from the previous one as RHEL 8 supported GNOME 3.28.

GNOME 40 offers a completely new look and ‘Activities Overview’ to provide exciting user experience when a person wishes to launch applications or navigate through them.

Along with this, there are various other enhancements too, including –

• Bettered screen sharing and remote desktop sessions
• A fresh user interface boasting polished icons
• The ‘log out/ power off’ menu now as a suspend option
• The ‘settings’ application section has been redesigned
• ‘Extensions’ application is now managing GNOME shell extensions instead of ‘Software’

• Universal Base Images to Build Containers –

Red Hat Universal Base Images, also known as RHUBIs offer a way out leading to easy building, running and managing of container images based on the RHEL software.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 offers control groups of cgroups, along with a bettered version of the podman that is a daemonless engine used for building and managing OCI containers present on the Linux system.

• Additional Support for Hardware Architecture –

This latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes equipped with Linux kernel 5.14.0, while its predecessor RHEL 8 came with Linux kernel 4.18.0.

RHEL 9 offers support to many hardware architectures and some of them are –

• 64- bit ARM architecture (ARMv8.0-A)
• IBM Power Systems, Little Endian (POWER9)
• Intel 64 -bit (x86-64-v2) & AMD architectures
• 64- bit IMB Z (z14)

RHEL 8 too supported various architectures including Little Endian IBM Z, 64- bit ARM architecture IBM Power System, AMD and Intel 64- bit architectures.

• Security & Identity –

As an additional feature, RHEL 9 offers OpenSSL 3.0.1, which comes with the provider concept. What is a provider? It is a set of algorithm implementations. This also comes along the latest versioning scheme which enhances the support for HTTPS.

Some additional cryptographic policies have been tweaked and upgraded to offer enhanced security including –

• TLS 1.1, 3DES, Camellia, FFDHE-1024, TLS 1.0, DSA, and RC4 have been deprecated
• Deprecation of SSH and TLS algorithms by using SHA-1 but with the exception of SHA-1 usage in HMACs, which stand for Hash-based Message Authentication Codes
• Increase in the minimum Diffie-Hellman parameter size in LEGACY and the minimum RSA key

The SELinux policy in RHEL 9 has also seen a new update. Many newer things are now a part of it and include –

• New permissions
• New features
• New classes

• Enhanced Cockpit Web Console to Manage RHEL 9 –

The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL 9 offers Cockpit web console in an enhanced format. The Cockpit web console is a web-based monitoring tool which is used to monitor both the virtual and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in a given network.

It is with the aid of a Cockpit that system administrators are able to intuitively carry out a humongous number of administrative tasks which include the following –

• The creation and management of user accounts
• Management of user accounts
• Monitoring of containers and virtual machines
• Updating and management of software packages
• Configuration of SELinux
• Management of subscriptions
• Monitoring of various metrics such as memory utilization, CPU, network statistics and disk, including others

The web console also supports live-kernel patching.

Critical kernel patches can now be applied instantly without any prior scheduling downtime or without disrupting services or applications in the production.

• Improved Java Implementations –

RHEL 9, which is the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux AppStream repository is inclusive of and supports three versions of OpenJDK. These are –

• OpenJDK 8 Java Runtime Environment as well as the OpenJDK 8 Java Software Development Kit
• OpenJDK 11 Java Runtime Environment as well as the OpenJDK 11 Java Software Development Kit
• OpenJDK 17 Java Runtime Environment as well as the OpenJDK 17 Java Software Development Kit

 

Conclusion

There are many more additional features that are a part of the newest version named RHEL 9 as compared to its predecessor RHEL 8. If you are looking to understand more about it and start your journey with Red Hat training and certification, then you need to get in touch with our experts today.