Marks the culmination of a multi-year long collaboration

Nov 13, 2017 16:34 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat announced today the general availability of the Red Enterpriose Linux 7.4 commercial operating system for ARM hardware.

Marking the culmination of a multi-year long collaboration between Red Hat and ARM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM is debuts today as part of Red Hat's multi-architecture strategy as the company plans to support as many hardware architectures as possible for its commercial Linux-based operating system. As such, ARM server support has been added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4.

"Our goal was to develop a single operating platform across multiple 64-bit ARMv8-A server-class SoCs from various suppliers while using the same sources to build user functionality and consistent feature set that enables customers to deploy across a range of server implementations while maintaining application compatibility," said Red Hat in the press release.

RHEL now runs on server-optimized ARM SoC products

The joint collaboration between Red Hat and ARM made it possible for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) to run on a wide variety of server-optimized SoC systems usually designed with cloud and hyperscale in mind, but also for telco and edge computing, as well as to run high-performance computing apps. ARM SoCs (System on Chip) offers extra choices to those seeking closely integrated hardware products.

Red Hat's goal was to develop a single operating platform that will work across several 64-bit ARMv8-A server-class SoCs from different manufacturers, while still providing customers with the functionality and consistent feature set that lets them deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux across a wide range of servers. A Development Preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM was first published in 2015.

Red Hat worked with ARM tech giants like Qualcomm and Cavium, but also with OEM partners like HPE to design and build systems based on the 64-bit ARM architecture a.k.a. ARM64 or AArch64. HPE’s Apollo 70 system is one of the first such products to ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM, though it also supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for ARM.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM is available for purchase today from Red Hat, and it ships with Red Hat Developer Toolset 7, Red Hat Software Collections 3, as well as an unsupported Development Preview of a single host KVM virtualization for ARM architectures. Read the release notes for more details on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM offering from Red Hat.