Red Hat Summit Red Hat SummitSupportConsoleDevelopersStart a trialContact

Chapter 1. Overview

1.1. Major changes in RHEL 9.6
Copy link

Installer and image creation

Key highlights for RHEL installer:

  • The newly created users will have administrative privileges by default, unless you deselect the option.
  • You can now set the required time zone by using new options instead of the time zone map.

Key highlights for RHEL image builder:

  • You can use RHEL image builder to create disk images with advanced partitioning.
  • You can customize your blueprint to enable injecting a Kickstart files when building ISO images.
  • Disk images, such as AWS or KVM, do not have a separate /boot partition.

For more information, see New features - Installer and image creation.

RHEL for Edge

Key highlights for RHEL for Edge:

  • RHEL for Edge will no longer include the dnsmasq package by default.
  • You can now add file system customizations to a blueprint when building the following image types:
  • simplified-installer
  • edge-raw-image
  • edge-ami
  • edge-vsphere
  • You can now create FIPS compliant RHEL for Edge images.
  • You can now use the FDO onboarding process, available as a Technology Preview, by storing and querying Owner Vouchers from the Sqlite or Postgresql databases.

For more information, see New features - RHEL for Edge.

Security

With the new sudo RHEL system role, you can consistently manage sudo configuration at scale across your RHEL systems.

The OpenSSL TLS toolkit is upgraded to version 3.2.2. OpenSSL now supports certificate compression extension (RFC 8879) and Brainpool curves have been added to the TLS 1.3 protocol (RFC 8734).

The ca-certificates program now provides trusted CA roots in the OpenSSL directory format.

The crypto-policies packages have been updated to extend its control to algorithm selection in Java.

The SELinux policy now provides a boolean that allows QEMU Guest Agent to execute confined commands.

The NSS cryptographic toolkit packages have been rebased to upstream version 3.101.

See New features - Security for more information.

Kernel

This release brings key updates to kernel stability, performance, and features. A recent change impacting MADV_RANDOM performance related to POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE has been reverted to maintain expected application behavior.

The eBPF facility has been updated to align with Linux kernel version 6.12, and TPM_TIS has been rebased to upstream 6.7 for enhanced Lenovo hardware support. In addition to this, kdump is rebased to version 6.10.

NVMf-FC kdump now supports the IBM Power system for running kexec-tools.

For cgroup v2, the /proc/cgroups file is deprecated, with the cgroup.stat file now providing the definitive source for cgroup subsystem information.

For more information about the features introduced in this release and changes in the existing functionality, see New features - Kernel.

Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers

Later versions of the following Application Streams are now available:

  • Apache HTTP Server 2.4.62
  • Node.js 22

See New features - Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers and Technology Previews - Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers for more information.

Compilers and development tools

Updated system toolchain

The following system toolchain components have been updated:

  • GCC 11.5
  • Annobin 12.92
Updated performance tools and debuggers

The following performance tools and debuggers have been updated in RHEL 9.6:

  • GDB 14.2
  • Valgrind 3.24.0
  • SystemTap 5.2
  • elfutils 0.192
  • libabigail 2.6
Updated performance monitoring tools

The following performance monitoring tools have been updated in RHEL 9.6:

  • PCP 6.3.7
  • Grafana 10.2.6
Updated compiler toolsets

The following compiler toolsets have been updated in RHEL 9.6:

  • GCC Toolset 14
  • LLVM Toolset 19.1.7
  • Rust Toolset 1.84.1
  • Go Toolset 1.23

For detailed changes, see New features - Compilers and development tools.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles

Notable new features in 9.6 RHEL system roles:

  • With the new RHEL system role aide, you can detect unauthorized changes to files, directories, and system binaries.
  • With the systemd RHEL system role you can now manage user units in addition to system units
  • You can use the ha_cluster RHEL system role to export the corosync configuration of an existing cluster in a format that can be fed back to the role to create the same cluster.
  • You can use the podman RHEL system role to manage the quadlet units of type Pod.
  • The metrics RHEL system role now supports Valkey as an alternative to Redis.

For more information, see New features - Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles.

RHEL in cloud environments

You can now use the OpenTelemetry framework to collect telemetry data, such as logs, metrics, and traces, from RHEL cloud instances, and to send the data to external analytics services, such as AWS CloudWatch.

See New features - RHEL in cloud environments for more information.

1.2. In-place upgrade
Copy link

In-place upgrade from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9

The supported in-place upgrade paths currently are:

  • From RHEL 8.10 to RHEL 9.4 and 9.6 on the following architectures:

    • 64-bit Intel, AMD, and ARM
    • IBM POWER 9 (little endian) and later
    • IBM Z architectures, excluding z13
  • From RHEL 8.10 to RHEL 9.4 and 9.6 on systems with SAP HANA

For more information, see Supported in-place upgrade paths for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For instructions on performing an in-place upgrade, see Upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

For instructions on performing an in-place upgrade on systems with SAP environments, see How to in-place upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

Notable enhancements include:

  • Due to an issue with booting on the RHEL 9 kernel, you could upgrade an ARM machine to only RHEL 9.4. The issue is now fixed and ARM machines can be upgraded on all supported upgrade paths, namely from RHEL 8.10 to RHEL 9.4 and RHEL 9.6.
  • Resource limitations are automatically adjusted when running the leapp utility to prevent various errors during the leapp execution.
  • Systems with encrypted storage can be upgraded if the storage uses the LUKS2 format configured with the Clevis TPM 2.0 token.
  • Implement a new solution to preserve Network Interface Card (NIC) names during the upgrade by using the net.naming-scheme argument in the kernel command line.
  • Introduce configuring in-place upgrades on systems by using Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI). For more information, see Using RHUI to configure an in-place upgrade.

In-place upgrade from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9

It is not possible to perform an in-place upgrade directly from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9. However, you can perform an in-place upgrade from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 and then perform a second in-place upgrade to RHEL 9. For more information, see In-place upgrades over multiple RHEL major versions by using Leapp.

1.3. Red Hat Customer Portal Labs
Copy link

Red Hat Customer Portal Labs is a set of tools in a section of the Customer Portal available at https://access.redhat.com/labs/. The applications in Red Hat Customer Portal Labs can help you improve performance, quickly troubleshoot issues, identify security problems, and quickly deploy and configure complex applications. Some of the most popular applications are:

1.4. Additional resources
Copy link

Capabilities and limits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 as compared to other versions of the system are available in the Knowledgebase article Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology capabilities and limits.

Information regarding the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle is provided in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle document.

The Package manifest document provides a package listing for RHEL 9, including licenses and application compatibility levels.

Application compatibility levels are explained in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9: Application Compatibility Guide document.

Major differences between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9, including removed functionality, are documented in Considerations in adopting RHEL 9.

Instructions on how to perform an in-place upgrade from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 are provided by the document Upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

The Red Hat Insights service, which enables you to proactively identify, examine, and resolve known technical issues, is available with all RHEL subscriptions. For instructions on how to install the Red Hat Insights client and register your system to the service, see the Red Hat Insights Get Started page.

Note

Public release notes include links to access the original tracking tickets, but private release notes are not viewable so do not include links.[1]


[1] Public release notes include links to access the original tracking tickets, but private release notes are not viewable so do not include links.
Back to top
Red Hat logoGithubredditYoutubeTwitter

Learn

Try, buy, & sell

Communities

About Red Hat Documentation

We help Red Hat users innovate and achieve their goals with our products and services with content they can trust. Explore our recent updates.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. For more details, see the Red Hat Blog.

About Red Hat

We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.

Theme

© 2025 Red Hat