On October 29th, 2020 Red Hat announced RHEL 8.3 the third service pack for their leading enterprise version. As soon as your middleware and application are available for RHEL 8 please plan for migration from older releases.
The kernel level for RHEL 8.3 is kernel-4.18.0-240.el8. This release contains many bug fixes but also many features. One key feature from System Z perspective is the support for KVM with many guests in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM Z & LinuxONE with Comprehensive Add-Ons. This now also includes support for the new Secure Execution feature of System Z.
Here are a few highlights of the new functions:
- The opencryptoki library has been upgraded to version 3.14 which includes
- z15 hardware support
- EP11 enhancements ( Edwards-curve digital signature algorithm (EdDSA) support and Dilithium support)
- Many security and compliance updates
- New GCC Toolset 10
- KVM enhancements (Secure Execution for System Z)
Here is my usual summary of links to more information:
- Complete RHEL 8 documentation
- IBM documentation
- RHEL limits
- KVM 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)