With the new 8.3 release, Red Hat is updating its Linux distribution for businesses. RHEL now disables Intel’s Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default. This is done for security reasons, as the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability of certain Xeon processors represents a serious security hole.

If desired However, users activate TSX manually; it can also be switched off in the BIOS setup of most systems. TSX – formerly known as Transactional Memory – is primarily intended to accelerate databases. TAA has been known since 2018 and Intel drew severe criticism with its late security updates that do not fully fix them.

New for the System Roles Red Hat is also expanding its System Roles, which can be used to specify and automate configurations. Among other things, the support of kernel parameters, log settings as well as SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver is new. In addition, the administrator can now use the system roles to make security configurations for Identity Management, Certificate Management and Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE).

There is also an update for Tuned that improves the performance of the RHEL -System with preconfigured profiles optimized for the respective server architecture. Also on board are new SCAP profiles (Secure Content Automation Protocol) for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and HIPAA, which is a US law for the protection of health information. With the SCAP profiles, companies are supposed to increase the security of their systems with the help of best practices and technical standards.

Furthermore, the application streams receive an update, which is now support including Node.js 14 and Ruby 2.7. The tool separates frameworks for developers, databases and container tools from core components of the operating system. There are also many updates for packages, readers can find details on this in the announcement of the release. The predecessor 8.2 saw the light of day in April 2020, while RHEL 8 2019 appeared and receives support for ten years.

(fo)