Red Hat the release of the distribution . The installation builds are prepared for architectures x86_64, s390x (IBM System z), ppc64le, and Aarch64, but for only for registered users of the Red Hat Customer Portal. The source texts of the rpm packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 are distributed through CentOS. The distribution will be supported at least until 2029.
The foundation for the new branch is based on technologies included in . The new branch is notable for switching the default to Wayland, replacing iptables with nftables, updating core components (kernel 4.18, GCC 8), using the DNF package manager instead of YUM, employing a modular repository, and discontinuing support for KDE and Btrfs.
Key :
- The transition to the package manager with a compatibility layer for Yum at the command line option level. Compared to Yum, DNF has significantly faster performance and lower memory consumption, better manages dependencies, and supports package grouping in modules;
- Separation into the BaseOS repository and the AppStream modular repository. BaseOS distributes the minimal set of packages necessary for the system to function, everything else is in the AppStream repository. AppStream can be used in two ways: as a traditional RPM repository and as a repository in modular format.
The modular repository offers groups of rpm packages organized into modules, whose support is independent of distribution releases. Modules can be used to install alternative versions of a specific application (for example, one can install PostgreSQL 9.6 or PostgreSQL 10). The modular organization allows users to switch to new significant releases of an application without waiting for a new distribution release and to remain on older, still supported, versions after upgrading the distribution. Modules include the core application and the libraries necessary for its operation (other modules may be used as dependencies);
- The default desktop offered is with the display server based on Wayland set as default. The environment based on X.Org Server is available as an option. Packages with the KDE desktop are excluded, only GNOME support remains;
- The Linux kernel package is built on the release . The default compiler used is . The system library Glibc has been updated to the release .
- The default implementation of the Python programming language is Python 3.6. Limited support for Python 2.7 is provided. Python is not included in the basic distribution; it needs to be installed separately. Updated versions include Ruby 2.5, PHP 7.2, Perl 5.26, Node.js 10, Java 8 and 11, Clang/LLVM Toolset 6.0, .NET Core 2.1, Git 2.17, Mercurial 4.8, and Subversion 1.10. CMake (3.11) build system is included.
- The Anaconda installer has added support for installing the system on NVDIMM drives.
- The installer and system now include the ability to encrypt disks using the LUKS2 format, which has replaced the previously used LUKS1 format (LUKS2 is now the default in dm-crypt and cryptsetup). LUKS2 features a simplified key management system, support for larger sectors (4096 instead of 512, reducing the load during decryption), symbolic partition identifiers (label), and metadata backup capabilities with automatic restoration from a copy in case of corruption.
- A new utility called Composer has been added, providing tools for creating customized bootable system images suitable for deployment in various cloud platform environments.
- Support for the Btrfs filesystem has been removed. The btrfs.ko kernel module, btrfs-progs utilities, and the snapper package are no longer included.
- The toolkit includes , providing tools for unifying and simplifying the configuration and management of a pool of one or more local storage devices. Stratis is implemented as a layer (the stratisd daemon) built on top of the devicemapper subsystem and XFS, allowing features like dynamic storage allocation, snapshots, integrity assurance, and layer creation for caching, without requiring expertise in storage system administration.
- System-wide policies for configuring cryptographic subsystems have been implemented, covering TLS, IPSec, SSH, DNSSec, and Kerberos protocols. With the update-crypto-policies command, you can now select one of the
cryptographic algorithm selection modes: default, legacy, future, and fips. The release with support for TLS 1.3; - Comprehensive support for smart cards and HSM (Hardware Security Modules) with PKCS#11 cryptographic tokens has been ensured.
- Replacing iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables, the nftables packet filter is now used by default and is notable for unifying the packet filtering interfaces for IPv4, IPv6, ARP, and network bridges. Nftables provides only a general interface at the kernel level, independent of specific protocols, and offers basic functions for extracting data from packets, performing data operations, and managing flow. The filtering logic and protocol-specific handlers are compiled into bytecode in user space, which is then loaded into the kernel using the Netlink interface and executed in a special virtual machine similar to BPF (Berkeley Packet Filters). The firewalld daemon has been transitioned to use nftables as the default backend. The utilities iptables-translate and ip6tables-translate have been added for converting old rules.
- To ensure network connectivity between multiple containers, support for IPVLAN virtual network drivers has been added.
- Included by default is the nginx HTTP server (1.14). Apache httpd has been upgraded to version 2.4.35, and OpenSSH to 7.8p1.
Available in repositories are MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.3, PostgreSQL 9.6/10, and Redis 4.0. The MongoDB database was excluded due to the new SSPL license, which has not yet been recognized as open-source;
- Components for virtualization have been modernized. By default, when creating virtual machines, the (emulating the ICH9 chipset) with PCI Express support is used. The Cockpit web interface can now be used to create and manage virtual machines. The virt-manager interface has been deprecated. QEMU has been upgraded to version . QEMU now implements a sandbox isolation mode, limiting the system calls that QEMU components can use;
- Support for tracing mechanisms based on eBPF has been added, including tools from SystemTap (4.0). Utilities for building and loading BPF programs are included;
- Experimental support for the XDP (eXpress Data Path) subsystem has been added, allowing BPF programs to run at the network driver level in Linux with direct access to the DMA buffer for packets and at the stage before the skbuff buffer is allocated by the network stack.
- The utility boom has been added to manage boot loader settings. Boom simplifies operations such as creating new boot entries, for example, when there is a need to boot from an LVM snapshot. Boom is limited to adding new boot entries and cannot be used to modify existing ones.
- A lightweight toolkit for managing isolated containers has been integrated, utilizing , for launching — and for discovering ready-made images — ;
- Cluster-related capabilities have been enhanced. The cluster resource manager Pacemaker has been updated to version 2.0. The utility provides full support for Corosync 3, knet, and node name resolution;
- The classic network configuration scripts (network-scripts) have been deprecated and are no longer included by default. To ensure backward compatibility, wrappers over NetworkManager have been added, working through the utility nmcli;
- crypto-utils, cvs, dmraid, empathy, finger, gnote, gstreamer, ImageMagick, mgetty, phonon, pm-utils, rdist, ntp (replaced with chrony), qemu (replaced with qemu-kvm), qt (replaced with qt5-qt), rsh, rt, rubygems (now included in the main ruby package), system-config-firewall, tcp_wrappers, wxGTK.
- A universal base image (UBI, ) has been prepared for creating isolated containers, including the ability to create single-application containers. UBI includes a minimal stripped-down environment, runtime enhancements for programming languages (nodejs, ruby, python, php, perl), and a set of additional packages in the repository.
Source: opennet.ru
