The first beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) was made available for download on 12 November 2024. As we did with the RHEL 9 Beta back in 2021, it’s useful to have a look at the beta and highlight some of the changes and new features that are available along with links to the official documents, press releases and relevant blog posts.
Press and forum links
- The Register: ‘Tis the season to test the RHEL and AlmaLinux 10 betas
- reddit: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta is Out
- Phoronix: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Enters Beta With Many New Features and Updates
- Centos Blog: Introducing CentOS Stream 10
Official Documentation
- Red Hat Documentation – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10-beta
- Red Hat Documentation – Considerations in adopting RHEL 10
- Red Hat Blog: Now Available Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta
RHEL 10 Beta Facts
Let’s have a look at some RHEL 10 facts and see how it compares to RHEL 9, released just over two and half years ago in 2022:
- The release has a codename of ‘Coughlan‘ (following on from Plow which was the name for RHEL 9)
- The kernel is based on 6.11.0 (versus 5.14.0 in RHEL 9)
* Note that CentOS Stream 10 is now on kernel 6.12 – see CentOS 10 uses kernel 6.12 and RHEL 10 uses kernel 6.11? Why? for further information - glibc is at version 2.39 (versus 2.34 in RHEL 9)
- systemd is at version 256 (versus 252 in RHEL 9.5)
- python is at version 3.12 (versus 3.9 in RHEL 9)
- bash is at version 5.2.26 (versus 5.1.8 in RHEL 9)
- dnf is at version 4.20 (versus 4.10 in RHEL 9)
- rpm is at version 4.19 (versus 4.16 in RHEL 9)
- sudo is at version 1.9.15 (versus 1.9.5 in RHEL 9)
- The release is based on Fedora 40 – list of changes in Fedora 40
Note
This post is not endorsed or affiliated with Red Hat – the information provided is based on experience, documentation and publicly available information. Feel free to leave feedback at the end of this page if anything needs correction.
For an up to date roadmap discussion on RHEL please contact your Red Hat Account rep.
Getting Started
For most people, the easiest way to get started is to download the RHEL 10 beta from the public Red Hat FTP site at https://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/rhel/rhel-10-beta/.
However, if you’ve never used the No-cost RHEL for developers subscription it’s worth signing up for. As well as access to the Red Hat documentation you can subscribe your own home lab servers so that you get the latest errata – it’s great for learning and testing. It’s possible to download the binary DVD from the Red Hat portal by clicking on the Downloads link in the top bar, selecting All Red Hat Enterprise Linux Downloads, type in ‘beta’ in the product variant box and selecting 10.0 Beta.
Image Builder
If downloading the Binary DVD from Red Hat does not appeal and you’ve not tried it before you can Build RHEL 10 Beta with Insights Image Builder. Using the tool, it’s possible to add customisations such as file system layout and the particular packages you want installed. You can chose the format of the resulting image to match your target environment – an ISO image for bare meta, a QCOW image for virtualisation or an image for the major cloud providers.
Significant Changes
Let’s take a look at some of the more significant changes that enterprises may need to take into account when deploying RHEL 10.
Application Streams
In RHEL 10 Application Steams do not use modularity as the packaging technology:
[root@rhel10 ~]# dnf module list
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Last metadata expiration check: 16:35:49 ago on Mon 16 Dec 2024 18:12:42 GMT.Compare that with RHEL 9 where there are many module streams:
[root@rhel9 ~]# dnf module list
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:18:26 ago on Tue 17 Dec 2024 10:26:38 GMT.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for x86_64 - AppStream (RPMs)
Name Stream Profiles Summary
mariadb 10.11 client, galera, server [d] MariaDB Module
maven 3.8 common [d] Java project management and project comprehension tool
nginx 1.22 common [d] nginx webserver
nginx 1.24 common [d] nginx webserver
nodejs 18 common [d], development, minimal, s2i Javascript runtime
nodejs 20 common [d], development, minimal, s2i Javascript runtime
nodejs 22 common [d], development, minimal, s2i Javascript runtime
php 8.1 common [d], devel, minimal PHP scripting language
php 8.2 common [d], devel, minimal PHP scripting language
postgresql 15 client, server [d] PostgreSQL server and client module
postgresql 16 client, server [d] PostgreSQL server and client module
redis 7 common [d] Redis persistent key-value database
ruby 3.1 common [d] An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language
ruby 3.3 common [d] An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language
Hint: [d]efault, [e]nabled, [x]disabled, [i]nstalled
Network Naming
Many sysadmins will remember network names such as eth0 It was possible to use these older names with previous RHEL releases by providing the net.ifnames=0 kernel parameter. With RHEL 10, this argument can no longer be used and predictable network interface names are necessary. For example, when running as a KVM guest, my RHEL 10 server uses ens3 as it’s primary interface.
Network Teaming
The teamd service has been removed in RHEL 10. It was marked as deprecated in RHEL 9 so hopefully this won’t be a big change for most organisations. The well-used kernel bonding is a suitable replacement.
Network Configuration Files
It’s no longer possible to use the old ifcfg format of network configuration files. This might be notable change for custom provisioning setups if you’ve been using old kickstarts or custom scripts – you’ll need to switch to the new key format.
OpenSCAP
Although the oscp-anaconda-addon package has been removed, there’s now a new Kickstart remediation type added, to help admins build secure, hardened systems by default.
Firefox
As of December 2024, the RHEL 10 Beta did not include the firefox web browser and the firefox and firefox-x11 packages are listed in the RHEL 10 removed packages To get up and running with firefox, flatpak provides one option that works fine on the beta.
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefoxInstallation
It’s been a while since I’ve used the interactive installer so the beta provides a nice opportunity to see what’s been modified.
Firstly, the integration with Red Hat Insights is front and center, with a nice dialogue box to allow to configure your system at installation time. Opting in to Insights is now a single checkbox. It’s nice to see this available even for this beta release.
The root account is disabled by default. This is a good security default and ensures that enabling it and optionally setting a password is a conscious choice.
Once you’ve answered the relevant sections in the installer summary you are good to begin your installation.
Desktop
On the desktop side of things, RHEL 10 beta has removed Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10. Wayland has been developed over the last few years and built from the ground up with hardware acceleration in mind. Some users who have legacy X11 applications may want to test that Xwayland is able to run their applications if they won’t immediately be ported to Wayland.
RHEL 10 beta ships with Gnome 47 with a prominent ’10’ background.
Performance
A nice side effect of updating your Operating System is the newer packages and performance enhancements that they bring. Phoronix has a great write-up if you’re looking at some early benchmarks as to what RHEL 10 might deliver:
However, as good as these improvements are, it may mean that you need a CPU that supports x86-64-v3 capabilities, so some hardware may not be able to RHEL 10.
EPEL
If you wish to test RHEL 10 today, you’ll be pleased to know that Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL 10) is available. As with RHEL 9, it’s recommended to add the Codeready Builder (CRB) repository if you use EPEL. As of the beta release, the commands below will enable the codeready-builder-beta-for-rhel-10-x86_64-rpms repository.
dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-10.noarch.rpm
/usr/bin/crb enableFor additional information, see EPEL – Fedora Project Wiki and Fedora Community Blog – EPEL 10 is now available.
It’s worth noting that as of December 2024, CentOS Stream 10 is a representation of 10.0 content with EPEL 10 being the 10.0 repo. However, the RHEL 10 beta is functionally a minor version before 10.0. The following diagram from the previous announcement blog post highlights this and Reddit Post helps explain this. The upshot of this is that while many EPEL packages work fine on the RHEL 10 beta, there may be some that don’t.
Wrap Up
This has been a very quick look at the RHEL 10 beta. We’ll update this page with further findings as we go but as always you can’t beat (a) testing this out for yourself (which is really easy with the No-cost RHEL for developers subscription) and (b) referring to the official Red Hat documentation for official answers to questions you may have.
Page history
- 17 December 2024 – initial version
- 17 January 2025 – fix typos, add link to using Image Builder for RHEL 10 Beta, add link to public FTP site to download RHEL 10