Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1 is now generally available (GA). This latest release adds many new developer features and updates developer tools to allow developers to focus on building applications. It also provides a platform for faster and more efficient development of critical workloads with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private, public cloud, and edge deployments. In this article, you'll learn about some of the features and enhancements in RHEL 10.1 that improve the developer experience.
You can download RHEL 10.1 at no cost as part of the Red Hat Developer program subscription.
AI accelerators
Recent RHEL updates have focused squarely on making it easier for customers to embrace AI. With RHEL 10.1, Red Hat is improving a key aspect of the interaction between the operating system and the hardware that supplies the raw computing power AI demands.
Red Hat is making vendor-validated AI accelerator drivers available in the RHEL Extensions Repository and Supplementary Repository. Like nearly everything in AI, hardware is advancing at a pace that data scientists and security teams struggle to maintain. Keeping current drivers for graphics processing units (GPU), tensor processing units (TPU), and other app-specific integration circuits (ASIC) is difficult. Bringing vendor-verified, compatible, RHEL-ready drivers to an ecosystem trusted by IT teams eliminates a lot of toil.
For RHEL 10.1, we have drivers from three leading hardware makers:
- NVIDIA: OpenRM kernel mode driver, CUDA toolkit.
- AMD: The amdgpu kernel mode driver and ROCm.
- Intel: Neural processing unit (NPU) kernel mode driver.
Image mode updates: Soft-reboots and reproducible builds
In RHEL 10.1, Red Hat is introducing a new systemd capability with image mode: soft-reboots. This new systemd capability cuts downtime by letting administrators alter system state without fully rebooting. With this update, developers can update or reset applications, libraries, and other userspace components without interrupting kernel operations.
With a soft-reboot, developers and users using image mode can quickly apply security patches, update software, or reset system states with minimal service interruptions. This means more time actually developing your applications.
Another efficiency improvement for image mode users in RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7 is a feature for reproducible builds for container tools in image mode. Previously, container images based on the same inputs still had slight variations, such as different timestamps. With this update, container images created from matching content are truly identical, all the way down to their metadata. That's a boost for security, reliability, and efficiency.
The latest versions of toolsets and compilers
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 offers updated versions of the Rust, GCC Toolset, LLVM, and Go compilers enabling developers to accelerate innovation, streamline operations, and modernize their applications with the latest developer compilers and tooling.
- Go 1.24 adds new standard library packages for weak pointers and crypto algorithms, support for generic type aliases, and several performance improvements to the runtime to decrease CPU overhead. Go 1.24 also introduces a new -json flag for the build, install, and test commands to report JSON-formatted results as well as improved finalization with runtime.AddCleanup (a more flexible, efficient, and less error-prone finalization mechanism).
- LLVM 20 includes several key enhancements, including support for new hardware features, improvements to its core libraries, and updates to tools like Clang and flang. In addition, LLVM 20 features a modernized JITLink infrastructure, improvements to Clang's diagnostics and static analysis, and the renaming of the flang-new compiler back to flang.
- Rust 1.88 includes several key enhancements that simplify development and boost performance, including the now stable Rust 2024 Edition with significant language changes. Additionally, for high-performance computing, many specific CPU features are now accessible directly in safe Rust. Additional features and improvements include:
- The 2024 Edition with let chains, allowing fluent &&-chaining of let statements within if and while conditions to reduce nesting and improve readability.
- For high-performance computing, many std::arch intrinsics can now be called in safe code if target features are enabled, making specific CPU features accessible directly in safe Rust.
- async closures are now supported, providing first-class solutions for asynchronous programming that allow borrowing from captures and proper expression of higher-ranked function signatures with AsyncFn traits.
- Trait upcasting allows coercing a reference to a trait object to a reference of its supertrait, simplifying common patterns, especially with the Any trait.
- Cargo now automatically cleans its cache, removing old downloaded files not accessed in 1-3 months, which helps manage disk space.
- GCC 15 supports increased program reliability with runtime assertions in the C++ standard library, which are now enabled by default for unoptimized builds. These assertions help detect common programming errors and prevent undefined behavior by terminating the program when detecting such issues.
- GCC Toolset 15 also includes a preview of the C++ standard library module. This enables you to simplify your code with the potential for reduced compile times.
- .NET 10 provides enhanced performance and new features. Developers can leverage the performance improvements and new functionalities in .NET 10. This includes better runtime performance (i.e., JIT inlining, method devirtualization, and stack allocation), new APIs for working with cryptography, globalization, numerics, collections and zip files, extended support for containers in the .NET SDK, and support for OpenAPI 3.1 in web applications.
- Node.js 24: The new features include a new URLPattern added as a global object for further web compatibility, an update to the V8 JavaScript engine. The permission model has been promoted out of experimental status and is now considered ready for production usage. This allows control of the Node.js process' ability to access the file system through the fs module, spawn processes, use node:worker_threads, use native add-ons, use WASI, and enable the runtime inspector.
- OpenJDK 25 includes many enhancements and additions to the Java specification, multiple bug fixes and stabilization fixes, and general performance improvements and new features, including the following:
- Java Flight Recorder enhancements (cooperative sampling, method timing and tracing)
- Generational Shenandoah garbage collector
- Late Barrier Expansion for the G1 garbage collector
- Ahead of time profiling, class loading and linking
- Compact object headers
- Synchronize virtual threads without pinning.
Latest updates to databases and tools
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has been updated with many developers' favorite programming languages and databases. Notable changes include:
- Valkey 8: New features in Valkey 8 include intelligent multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O threading (which significantly improves performance particularly for TLS connections), improved cluster scaling with automatic failover for new shards and replicated migration states, faster replication with dual-channel RDB and replica backlog streaming, improved per-slot and per-client metrics, providing granular visibility into performance and resource usage and up to 10% reduced memory overhead through optimized key storage.
- PostGIS extension for PostgreSQL database enables support for geographic objects in the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification for SQL and is certified as compliant with the Types and Functions profile. PostGIS spatially enables the PostgreSQL server, allowing use as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial extension.
Post-quantum cryptography
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) was a leap forward for security when introduced with RHEL 10. In RHEL 10.1, Red Hat continues to evolve for a post-quantum world by enhancing PQC support for transport layer security (TLS). Introducing PQC algorithms to the transit layer shores up data security at points where information crosses networks, a gap for many organizations.
OpenTelemetry Collector, part of RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 cloud images, now includes support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) on all three major public cloud platforms. By safeguarding cryptographic keys and attestation data in the cloud, TPM brings hardware-grade security to the software-only environments where hybrid IT increasingly works.
That applies to cloud virtual machine deployments, too. The OpenTelemetry Collector upgrade also includes support for virtualized TPM (vTPM) for RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7 cloud images.
Cloud-crossing consistency with simpler image creation
The image builder has been a go-to tool for customers using RHEL in public clouds. In RHEL 10.1, the process of creating RHEL images becomes simpler with the debut of our image builder command-line interface (CLI). With no need for continuously running services, image builder users can install and set up build environments more easily. That streamlines integration of RHEL image building into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and automated workflows.
Ultimately, it also lets developers build and deploy with consistent settings and standardized processes, regardless of the environment. The image builder CLI is currently in tech preview.
Try RHEL 10.1
With RHEL 10.1, our operating system continues to evolve, enabling customers to operate consistently and embrace AI, PQC, and other new technologies as they emerge.
For more information about our evolution and to test RHEL 10.1, refer to these additional resources:
- Download RHEL 10.1 and get started.
- RHEL 10.1 Release Notes
- RHEL 10.1 Documentation
