RHEL 9.5 debuts alongside AlmaLinux, Rocky, and Oracle updates

Plus, soon you'll be able to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a supported option under WSL

The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is here, as are the leading RHELatives. Also, interestingly, Red Hat is working with Microsoft to make it available on top of Windows.

Red Hat released version 9.5 of its flagship Linux distribution. The release notes contain details of all the changes, but be warned. In PDF format, they are 219 pages long.

It was followed five days later by AlmaLinux 9.5 "Teal Serval," whose release notes are significantly more digestible. As with previous releases, perhaps the most interesting aspect of AlmaLinux compared to its rivals is that it retains support for a a wide range of hardware that's been dropped from the upstream distro. In this release, the "Extended Hardware Support" table contains 140 rows.

The following day, Rocky Linux 9.5 followed, with the shortest set of release notes of the trio. Also on November 19, Rocky's partner in the OpenELA group, Oracle, put out Oracle Linux 9 Update 5.

As is normal for RHELatives, they all share much the same list of new features. All use kernel 5.14, although Oracle also offers its own kernel version. The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" is based on the upstream LTS kernel 5.15, and includes Btrfs support.

In all of them, you get GCC 14, LLVM 18.1, Rust 1.79, and Go 1.22. The Cockpit web-based server-management GUI now includes a file manager. They now offer version 5.0 of Podman, which is a Docker-compatible container management tool that provides daemonless operation and can run containers rootless – in other words, ordinary, unprivileged users can create, run, and manage containers.

The system Java VM has been upgraded from OpenJDK 11 to OpenJDK 17, and they also offer version 9.0 of .NET, and version 9.18 of the BIND DNS server.

If you want to see the source code but don't want to sign up as a Red Hat customer or developer, the OpenELA announced that it's released its RHEL-compatible source code. It's available on GitHub, in approximately 3,100 repositories.

Run RHEL on Windows

On the same day as the Rocky and Oracle announcements, some unexpected news emerged. Red Hat announced that it is working with Microsoft on bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Windows Subsystem for Linux. The IBM subsidiary's announcement is brief and light on details, but it links to a Microsoft blog post on what's new in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in November 2024.

There's not a lot of deep info here either, but the gist is that a new format is coming soon for packaging up distros to run on WSL 2. (The now-deprecated WSL 1 was an additional OS emulation layer, but WSL 2, which is distributed on the Microsoft Store, is a customized Linux VM that integrates the Linux guest more closely with its Windows host.) Previously, packaging was an issue, which may be why the first of the RHELatives to appear on WSL 2 was Oracle Linux 8.5.

Now Microsoft is introducing a simpler way to package up distros so that they can be easily installed in a WSL 2 guest session. Previously, these had to be placed inside a Microsoft-specific format called a .appxbundle, but no longer. Since WSL version 2.4.4, you can just provide a .tar file and some metadata. (Yes, it does sound a bit like Microsoft has reinvented the tarball. Isn't progress wonderful?)

The old formats will still work and aren't going away, but the new format will make it a little easier for a pure xNix shop to create and package their distro in this format. There are a few requirements and other things that have to be just so, but it looks fairly straightforward. We confess to a moment's amusement at reading this section of the docs:

If systemd is enabled, units that can cause issues with WSL should be disabled or masked. The below units are known to cause issues in WSL distributions:

• systemd-resolved.service

• systemd-networkd.service

• NetworkManager.service

The Reg FOSS desk suggests that Microsoft is far from the only organization to have encountered issues with those systemd services. ®