RHEL 8.6: What's new and how to upgrade

Version 8.6 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now generally available, and includes a number of features and upgrade paths that will benefit developers and DevOps teams. This article covers some of the most notable improvements. Please refer to the release notes for a comprehensive list of changes.

Support for newer versions of language runtimes

• PHP 8.0 provides several bug fixes and enhancements, such as the use of structured metadata syntax, newly named arguments that are order-independent, and improved performance for Just-In-Time compilation.
• Perl 5.32 provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements, including Unicode version 13, a new experimental infix operator, and faster feature checks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the edge

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 now supports automatic provisioning and onboarding for edge images. With this update, customers can build Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the edge, provision it, use the FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO) process to automatically provision and onboard edge devices, and exchange data with other devices and systems connected on the network.

New system roles

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 has new system roles that enable seamless automation for system administrators. Here is a list of new system roles:

• High availability (HA) cluster system role: This role helps create and manage secure, stable HA clusters. It also enables DevOps teams to have better control over managing multiple clusters.
• Enhanced network system role: This role helps DevOps teams create secure connections (including over Wi-Fi) along with robust firewall rules.
• WebConsole role: This role automates the installation and configuration of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console, including the tasks of installing the web console package, starting and enabling the web console, and configuring settings such as idle timeout.

Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

There are a variety of upgrade paths in version 8.6:

• In-place upgrades are supported from Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6 or 7 to version 8.
• It is now possible to perform an in-place upgrade with SAP HANA on AWS pay-as-you-go approach instances using Red Hat Update Infrastructure.
• It is now possible to enable Extended Update Support and E4S repositories during an in-place upgrade.
• Customers currently using CentOS 8 or Oracle Linux 8 can convert their operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 using the Red Hat-supported Convert2RHEL utility. For more information, please see Converting from an RPM-based Linux distribution to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat customers can get direct access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Customer Portal.