Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6, followed by the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Installation images are now available for registered users on the Red Hat Customer Portal, as well as ISO images for CentOS Stream 9 and free assemblies for developers. The release is compatible with architectures X86_64, S390X, PPC64le, and Aarch64, with support promised until 2032 as part of the 10-year support cycle.
Initial RPM packages for RHEL 9.6 are accessible only to company customers through a closed section of the website with a user agreement prohibiting data redistribution. Despite this, the initial texts are available in the CentOS Stream repository, though not fully synchronized with RHEL packages. Other distributions like Rocky Linux, Oracle, and SUSE are reproducing these packages under the OpenIa project.
In terms of key changes in RHEL 9.6, the release includes updated packages for developers such as GCC 11.5, Node.js 22, MySQL 8.4, PHP 8.3, GDB 14.2, and more. It also features updated system packages like RSyslog 8.2412.0, Openssl 3.2.2, and NSS 3.101. Additionally, updated server packages like Apache httpd 2.4.62, nginx 1.26, and Grafana 10.2.6 are included.
New additions to RHEL 9.6 include support for the Landlock module, which provides programs with non-privileged access to Linux kernel resources. The release also supports the EROFS file system and includes the Snapm utility for system snapshot management.