Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Beta Released With New Features, Improvements

Red Hat is ending out the quarter by issuing their first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 continues the company's work on improving their hybrid cloud capabilities, system administrative and management enhancements, and more. There are also select new/updated packages and various kernel features back-ported to their Linux 4.18 based kernel.

Among the highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 beta include:

- Expanded support for eBPF with RHEL 8.4.

- Proactive memory compaction is now included in the RHEL 8 default kernel albeit disabled by default.

- RHEL8 now supports Error Detection and Correct (EDAC) kernel module functionality for newer Intel processors.

- The new "kpatch-dnf" package has been added as a DNF plug-in to apply live kernel patch updates using Kpatch.

- Time namespace support for the RHEL8 kernel.

- RHEL 8.4 now formally supports the surprise removal of NVMe storage devices.

- Support for SMB Direct.

- OpenIMPI 2.0.29 is in place along with FreeIPMI 1.6.6.

- Support for IPsec VPN with TCP transport thanks to upgrading to LibreSwan 4.3.

- NetworkManager 1.30 packages are also now present.

- Python 3.9 support via the new python39 module. Redis 6 and PostgreSQL 13 modules are also now available.

- The LLVM Toolset has been re-based to LLVM 11.0. Rust 1.49 is also available.

- Intel Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics are now supported.

More details on the RHEL 8.4 Beta via RedHat.com.