Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 beta is now available. The beta release was announced in a Red Hat blog post by Chris Baker.
The latest update to the stable and more secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform marks the final release in the Full Support Phase (formerly known as "Production Phase 1") of the RHEL 7 lifecycle as described in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lifecycle.
“This 10-year lifecycle is a key feature of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform,” wrote Baker. “As minor releases progress within a major release lifecycle, focus is placed on maintaining infrastructure stability for production environments and enhancing the reliability of the operating system. With RHEL 7 entering the next phase of its lifecycle, future releases will emphasize production stability, rather than introducing net-new features.”
The RHEL 7.7 beta includes enhancements and bug fixes to help deliver a platform for hybrid cloud computing. According to Baker, key updates include support for the latest generation of enterprise hardware as well as remediation for the recently-disclosed Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)/ZombieLoad vulnerabilities.
In addition, Baker said, the beta release also includes performance enhancements for the network stack, as well as the ability to offload virtual switching operations to network interface card (NIC) hardware. These features also improve the operation of Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift deployments.
RHEL 7.7 beta users will have default access to Red Hat Insights as part of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Red Hat Insights provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based predictive analytics solution, helping enterprise IT teams to better assess and mitigate potential problems to their systems before they impact production.
For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 beta is available in the release notes.