Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to deliver the best possible experience for enterprise system administrators and developers, as well as provide a solid foundation for moving workloads into both public and private clouds. One of the ways to enable such ubiquity is Red Hat’s multi-architecture initiative, which focuses on bringing Red Hat’s software portfolio to different hardware architectures.
Last week, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 went live. It brought forward several improvements relevant to developers and system administrators such as advanced GUI system management via the Cockpit console, which should help new Linux administrators, developers, and Windows users to perform expert tasks without having to get into the command line.
This release also marks a new milestone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: all supported architectures are now simultaneously enabled. The list of supported architectures includes x86_64, PowerPC Big Endian and Little Endian, s390x, and the more recently introduced 64-bit Arm and IBM POWER9 architectures.
Moreover, we are making new architectures even more accessible to developers by including the operating system for 64-bit Arm servers in the free Developer subscription. You can now download Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM directly from developers.redhat.com. If you don’t have an account, join the Red Hat Developer Program; registration is easy and free.
To save you some headaches in getting this OS version installed and running, you should be aware that not all Arm systems out there are designed to be true enterprise-grade servers. Our OS is focused on enabling Arm server hardware that supports SBSA and SBBR standards and that boot only with UEFI. This means that, by design, you would not be able to run this OS on Raspberry Pi or similar lightweight devices.
We are looking forward to seeing more enterprise developers grabbing these bits for their software porting and testing efforts, especially since the included user-land tools and utilities are standard across all existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 releases. The big news with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM is the inclusion of the 4.14 Linux kernel. And, if you are in need of the newer software components or compilers, be sure to grab the latest release of the Developer Toolset and Software Collections that are available free of charge across all supported architectures, including 64-bit Arm.
Most importantly, whatever you decide to do, have fun doing it!
Last updated: November 1, 2023