Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

[Posted May 11, 2022 by jake]

On May 10, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9). Not surprisingly, the announcement is rather buzzword-heavy and full of marketing, though there are some technical details scattered in it. The release notes for the RHEL 9 beta are available, which have a lot more information. "The platform will be generally available in the coming weeks."

Building on decades of relentless innovation, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform is the first production release built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This approach helps the broader Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem, from partners to customers to independent users, provide feedback, code and feature updates to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 0:23 UTC (Thu) by bmur (guest, #52954) [Link] (9 responses)

Has a consensus RHEL clone been picked now that centos is no longer occupying that role?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 1:00 UTC (Thu) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link]

It seems to be AlmaLinux OS:
https://almalinux.org/
to take over the former role of CentOS Linux stable release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 1:05 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (5 responses)

I prefer Alma myself. They have a WSL release, they came out with a 9-beta and an 8.6-beta... and we'll see how long before 8.6 and 9 come out from Alma compared to Rocky.

That isn't say that I have any ill-will toward Rocky. I'm sure it is a fine community and distro. The fact that I just saw a story saying they just got a sponsor giving them $26 million means that in the not-too-distant-future, they may start catching up to Alma.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 1:16 UTC (Thu) by tau (subscriber, #79651) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, we saw what happened when there was only one free RHEL repack in town. Maybe it is worthwhile for two repacks to continue to exist, as long as both are credibly able to independently of each other.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 2:40 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (1 responses)

There are more than two. There is also Oracle and EuroLinux... and a couple of others. I saw that EuroLinux 8.6 was released today. Checking the AlmaLinux mirrors, 8.6 is syncing but they haven't announced it yet. I expect first thing tomorrow.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 19:11 UTC (Thu) by bgpepi (guest, #77064) [Link]

Thay are release...
https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-86-stable-is-now-ava...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 6:07 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

CentOS wasn’t the only: there was always at least the Scientific Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 14, 2022 1:14 UTC (Sat) by cozzyd (guest, #110972) [Link]

There was no Scientific Linux 8.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 18:03 UTC (Thu) by cozzyd (guest, #110972) [Link]

I use AlmaLinux, but that's partially because my daughter's name is Alma.

RHEL clones

Posted May 12, 2022 22:42 UTC (Thu) by xose (subscriber, #535) [Link]

Mainly it's a competition between Alma and Rocky. But there are more of them:
Notable Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 12, 2022 5:13 UTC (Thu) by fweimer (guest, #111581) [Link] (7 responses)

To anyone looking for the actual binaries and wondering if something is wrong with their Customer Portal account: The title is incorrect, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 has not released yet. In the past, it was generally true that when the press release went out, the bits were already available for download, but some time ago, we switched to pre-announcing upcoming releases. (8.6 went out this week, though.)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 12, 2022 21:42 UTC (Thu) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (6 responses)

That's extremely annoying and I wish they didn't do that. In the era of purely digital delivery, this kind of releasing is just aggravating.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 12, 2022 22:49 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (5 responses)

> That's extremely annoying and I wish they didn't do that. In the era of purely digital delivery, this kind of releasing is just aggravating.

It seems that RHEL 8 is still supported. So how on earth does this announcement hurt you?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 13, 2022 0:01 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (4 responses)

I wanted to hit the ground running with RHEL 9. I was surprised and annoyed when the press release went out and I couldn't download RHEL 9 right away.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 13, 2022 4:08 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

If 8.6 and 9 have to be released separately, I wish 9 went out first. People will probably care less about 8.6 since it doesn't get as much fanfare.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 15:34 UTC (Sat) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

The release announcement for things like RHEL 9 is set up to coordinate with an event (in this case, Red Hat Summit) which has a hard deadline and the vast majority of people who consume RHEL are *not* going to jump on RHEL 9 day one, or even before RHEL 9.1.

Big software companies are going to "announce" at major events whether the software is shipping yet or not. That's when press, investors, analysts and decision makers are focused on announcements and that's when it's going to be announced. I get where you're coming from, but being annoyed by this is like being annoyed because the sun rises at an inconvenient time for you.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 15:52 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

As ever: it depends and people's motivations vary. There's a bunch of people who will want to see what it's like - whether you can move cleanly to it from a previous iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example. There's some who will be relying on the regular release cadence that we've come to expect from, say Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - twice a year in May and November - date based, fairly well.

[And there were and are a bunch who missed out on CentOS 8/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 who may be looking to cross-grade machines or upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 to "something" before 2024]

Precisely _because_ it's announced at a major conference, that's exactly when you would expect it to actually be available for download as a stable release for the early adopters. Red Hat don't normally announce when beta releases are due so the first you know is when they turn up and then you get the major release ??? time later.

I'm fairly sure that I can't upgrade 8.6 -> 9 straightforwardly - so that's yet another futile re-install. Dear IBM - I know that the only thing that matters to you is containers and clouds these days but at least learn from Debian in ease of updating - oh, and reproducible builds would be handy too for confidence. Roll on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to actually make some progress from Red Hat 9 which is what some of us remember as the last "real" Red Hat (and before distributions started playing the version numbers game).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 17:19 UTC (Sat) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

> I'm fairly sure that I can't upgrade 8.6 -> 9 straightforwardly - so that's yet another futile re-install.

Actually, Red Hat supports in-place upgrades[1] from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. I expect that in-place upgrades from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 will be supported with the same tooling.

[1]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ent...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 12, 2022 13:00 UTC (Thu) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

With the Xeon scalable processors, Intel is fighting back against corporate; but with the IBM acquisition and integration of CentOS it appears RedHat is continuing to move towards corporate cardboard-box plankton hydroponics.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

Posted May 14, 2022 15:58 UTC (Sat) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link]

Are they still dropping support for every processor that doesn't meet a higher microarchitectural feature level?