Brings enhanced security and new developer tools

Nov 5, 2019 16:45 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat officially released today the first point release to its latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system series, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, which brings updated components, enhanced security, and new developer tools.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 is here to deliver more intelligent management through enhanced automation, new enterprise-grade security enhancements, updated drivers for better hardware support, greater developer productivity, as well as yet another layer of performance enhancements to keep the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system a reliable, stable, and secure platform for hybrid clouds and other enterprise environments.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 include container-centric SELinux profiles to allow system administrators to create security policies that are more tailored to their needs for better control over container access of a host system's resources, such as compute, network, and storage, as well as application whitelisting, which lets sysadmins be more selective of the applications that are allowed to be launched on a machine, reducing the risk of malicious apps.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 also comes with additional FIPS-140 and Common Criteria certifications, the ability to configuring firewall rules and system services in detail via the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console, which improves manageability, support for importing QCOW virtual images, along with the ability to pause and resume VMs, and full support for live kernel patching to limit system downtime.

"The hybrid cloud is fueled by a consistent, reliable and more secure foundation, and we designed Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be this bedrock for enterprise computing’s future. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 continues to build upon this vision for both our customers and our partners like Microsoft and SAP, refining the intelligence, automation and enhanced security needed by IT teams to deliver production workloads across the hybrid cloud while still helping to drive application development innovations," said Stefanie Chiras, Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat.

New developer tools, performance improvements

Among other changes included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 release, we can mention new developer tools, application frameworks, and languages that boost developer productivity, such as support for more configuration options for users and SSH keys in the Image Builder, support for new image formats for various cloud platforms like Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud Platform, as well as the latest versions of the most popular Open Source tools and languages, including Golang and .NET Core.

On top of that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 adds various performance improvements by implementing new tools like eBPF, which is an extended version of the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) designed to help system administrators troubleshoot complex network issues, and XDP (eXpress Data Path), an eBPF-based high performance data path. Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 users can download the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 update right now from the Red Hat's Customer portal.