Red Hat, a global leader in open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1 and 9.7, two updates that expand on the capabilities introduced with RHEL 10 and strengthen its commitment to a smarter, future-ready infrastructure. These new versions of the enterprise Linux platform include enhancements aimed at narrowing the IT skills gap through AI-assisted management even offline, bolstering protection against quantum threats, and providing more precise control over operational consistency.
Both RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7 establish themselves as a strategic and stable foundation to tackle the increasingly complex hybrid cloud environment, especially with the rising demand for AI workloads. According to an IDC study sponsored by Red Hat, IT infrastructure teams are on average 32% more efficient with Red Hat solutions than with free open source alternatives, freeing up resources to pursue new initiatives. Additionally, development teams working on RHEL report a 20% productivity increase compared to other open platforms at no cost.
With these updates, Red Hat reaffirms its commitment to equipping organizations with modern tools, more agile management, and cohesive operations that help organize and optimize fragmented IT infrastructures, enabling businesses to adapt flexibly to changing challenges.
Closing Skills Gaps in AI and Linux
AI-assisted Linux management is crucial for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat’s command-line assistant significantly reduces skill barriers to help manage and troubleshoot connected systems. The CLI assistant now features an expanded context limit, allowing customers to attach more data, making log analysis and large data stream troubleshooting more effective. Moreover, the offline version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux command-line assistant (preview for developers) is a standalone tool that runs locally, enabling users to receive AI-guided assistance for Linux tasks in disconnected environments—key for highly sensitive and regulated industries where cloud services are restricted.
As IT teams rapidly deploy AI solutions, frequent updates to AI accelerators’ drivers can cause software conflicts and disrupt production. Red Hat Enterprise Linux users can now more easily access and install validated drivers for leading AI accelerators from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. With these components ready, RHEL provides validated and signed drivers to offer a secure foundation for emerging and mission-critical AI workloads, helping to reduce bottlenecks and speed up AI/ML lifecycle processes.
Simplified Management and Operational Efficiency
Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to optimize IT operations with features that help minimize downtime and enhance consistency. RHEL 10.1 introduces soft-reboots, a new image mode capability allowing administrators to change system states without a full kernel reboot. This enables faster updates and patches with minimal impact on critical production applications, keeping essential services online even during maintenance.
RHEL also supports reproducible builds for container image tools, ensuring container images built with identical content are identical—enhancing security and efficiency in cloud-native application pipelines without limiting time-to-market for new applications. Additionally, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) is now generally available, automating the manual, error-prone process of security certificate updates for production applications, helping maintain security and reliability standards.
Enhanced Protection Against Future Threats
Building on the post-quantum cryptography capabilities introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, RHEL 9.7 now incorporates the same post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to address potential threats posed by future quantum computing. RHEL 10.1 enhances TLS support for post-quantum cryptography, safeguarding critical data in transit. Additionally, the OpenTelemetry Collector on RHEL 9 and 10 Cloud Images now supports Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, enabling secure operations within tamper-proof hardware environments.
Greater Control Over Content and Data
Alongside RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7, Red Hat Satellite 6.18 offers customers increased control over critical data and system components through a centralized management platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads.
The latest release expands on on-premises analytics capabilities, including general availability of advisory services and a technical preview for vulnerability management. The advisory service proactively identifies known configuration issues and risks in your OS and workloads, with prioritized, automated recommendations. The vulnerability service allows local integration to assess, monitor, report, and remediate CVEs affecting RHEL deployments. For data-sensitive customers, this version offers greater control over data sent to Red Hat, enabling the submission of only minimal required information for subscription notifications. Satellite also introduces enhanced reporting options and continuous content views, helping admins restrict repository access while still receiving updates.