RHEL 8.5: OpenJDK 17, .NET 6, and more

November 10, 2021
Don Pinto
Related topics:
.NETContainersJavaLinuxOpen source
Related products:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux

At Red Hat Summit 2019, we announced that minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be available every six months. Following the success of RHEL 8.4 in May 2021, we have completed yet another exciting release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 is now available. We recommend upgrading both your development and production systems to the new 8.5 release.

Read on for an overview of the major highlights for developers in RHEL 8.5.

What's new in RHEL 8.5?

With RHEL 8.5, we continue to deliver a streamlined path from development to deployment that unifies teams across a single open platform, including the tools and analytics needed to build and manage these systems on any footprint—from the data center to the cloud to the edge, and beyond. With access to the latest tools, programming languages, and enhanced container capabilities, development teams can achieve faster time to value when producing new code. Learn more about the benefits that RHEL 8.5 provides in this announcement.

Support for OpenJDK 17 and .NET 6

RHEL 8.5 brings support for OpenJDK 17 and .NET 6, which lets you modernize and build next-generation workloads and applications.

  • With Red Hat’s OpenJDK 17, you can start using the latest long-term release of Java to modernize applications and take advantage of the language's new features, while also strengthening the stability of existing application environments. One noteworthy feature of the release is an enhanced pseudo-random number generator, which forms a common basis for many cryptographic operations, algebraic data types which simplify how complex data can be modeled, and enforcement of strict floating-point consistency for better predictability of numerically sensitive applications.
  • RHEL 8.5 includes .NET 6, which is a long-term release. In addition to x64-architecture (64-bit Intel/AMD), .NET 6 is also available for arm64 (64-bit ARM), and s390x (64-bit IBM Z). .NET Core 6 builds on the success of .NET Core 5 and adds performance improvements to the base libraries, garbage collector, and Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. With C# 10 and F# 6 support, you can modernize your applications with the latest language features, such as using the new minimal API for creating web applications with less code.

Container development tooling and base images

Standardized and secure container development tooling and base images make it easier for DevOps teams to build, share, and collaborate on RHEL applications.

  • The OpenJDK 17 runtime will be available as a Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) container. This lets you test and upgrade applications with the new Java version as well as include the latest Java version in your CI/CD pipelines. When combined with the latest version of JDK Mission Control, you can monitor and profile Java applications more easily to enhance performance.
  • With native rootless user overlay file system support in Podman, enjoy an improved performance experience for building and running images, along with the added flexibility and enhanced security of rootless containers.

Looking for a specific container image? Check out the Red Hat Certified Containers through the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. This makes it easier to build and deploy applications using the supported application streams for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift environments.

New runtimes and web servers with application streams

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 introduced application streams to offer greater flexibility to developers exploring different versions of software. RHEL 8.5 provides developers with the latest supported application runtimes and web server versions through application streams:

  • Ruby 3.0 is a very significant version of Ruby that enables developers to build modern web applications. Ruby 3.0 offers improved performance, concurrency support, and language correctness, among other noteworthy features.
  • Nginx 1.20 brings several new features, security fixes, and enhancements over the previously released 1.18 version. These features include support for client SSL certificate validation with Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), enhanced directives, and improved HTTP/2 support.
  • Node.js 16 provides several new features including improved platform support, V8 JavaScript engine version 9, and other API enhancements.
  • Additionally, several compiler packages and development tools are updated: Go toolset (1.16.7), Rust toolset (1.54.0), LLVM toolset (12.0.1), CMake (3.20.2), and GCC toolset (11).

How to get started with RHEL 8.5

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 continues Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice in terms of the underlying compute architecture, with availability across x86_64, ppc64le, s390x, and aarch64 hardware.

Last updated: November 16, 2021