On April 21st, 2020 Red Hat announced RHEL 8.2 the second service pack for their new enterprise version. With the transition of RHEL 7.8 to Maintenance Mode 2 this is now the premier enterprise distribution.
The kernel level for 8.2 is kernel-4.18.0-193.el8. This release contains many bug fixes but also many features.
This is a bug fix and feature release. On System Z RHEL 8.2 contains a lot of bug fixes and also quite some new functions. A few high lights are:
- In place upgrade from RHEL 7.8 to RHEL 8.2 for System Z (leapp update)
- In place upgrade from RHEL 7.6 (structure A / KVM) to RHEL 8.2 for System Z
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM Z & LinuxONE with Comprehensive Add-Ons offers KVM support for unlimited virtual guests
- Hardware accelerated zlib for z15 based systems
- Secure Boot support in the installer
Here is my usual summary of links to more information:
- Complete RHEL 8 documentation
- IBM documentation
- RHEL limits
- RHEL lifecycle with the end date for the Extended Update Service (EUS)
- RHEL 8 Application Streams Life Cycle
- RHEL 8 package list (will be updated always to the latest service pack)