Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.7 is now generally available (GA). This latest release adds many new developer features and updates developer tools to allow developers to focus on building applications. It also provides a platform for faster and more efficient development of critical workloads with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private, public cloud, and edge deployments. In this article, you’ll learn about some of these features and enhancements in RHEL 9.7 that improve the developer experience.

You can download RHEL 9.7 at no cost as part of the Red Hat Developer program subscription.

The latest versions of toolsets and compilers

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7 offers updated versions of the Rust, GCC Toolset, LLVM, and Go compilers enabling developers to accelerate innovation, streamline operations, and modernize their applications with the latest developer compilers and tooling.

• Go 1.24 adds new standard library packages for weak pointers and crypto algorithms, support for generic type aliases, and several performance improvements to the runtime to decrease CPU overhead. Go 1.24 also introduces a new -json flag for the build, install, and test commands to report json formatted results as well as Improved finalization with runtime.AddCleanup, a more flexible, efficient, and less error-prone finalization mechanism.

• **LLVM 20 **includes several key enhancements, including support for new hardware features, improvements to its core libraries, and updates to tools like Clang and flang. In addition, LLVM 20 features a modernized JITLink infrastructure, improvements to Clang’s diagnostics and static analysis, and the renaming of the flang-new compiler back to flang.

• **Rust 1.88 **includes several key enhancements that simplify development and boost performance, including the now stable Rust 2024 Edition with significant language changes. Additionally, for high-performance computing, many specific CPU features are now accessible directly in safe Rust. Additional features and improvements include:

• The 2024 Edition with let chains, allowing fluent &&-chaining of let statements within if and while conditions to reduce nesting and improve readability

• For high-performance computing, many std::arch intrinsics can now be called in safe code if target features are enabled, making specific CPU features accessible directly in safe Rust.

• async closures are now supported, providing first-class solutions for asynchronous programming that allow borrowing from captures and proper expression of higher-ranked function signatures with AsyncFn traits.

• Trait upcasting allows coercing a reference to a trait object to a reference of its supertrait, simplifying common patterns, especially with the Any trait.

• **Cargo **now automatically cleans its cache, removing old downloaded files not accessed in 1-3 months, which helps manage disk space.

• GCC 15** **supports increased program reliability with runtime assertions in the C++ standard library, which are now enabled by default for unoptimized builds. These assertions help detect common programming errors and prevent undefined behavior by terminating the program when such issues are detected.

• **GCC Toolset 15 **also includes a preview of the C++ standard library module. This enables you to simplify your code with the potential for reduced compile times.

• .NET 10 provides enhanced performance and new features. Developers can leverage the performance improvements and new functionalities in .NET 10. This includes better runtime performance (such as JIT inlining, method devirtualization and stack allocation), new APIs for working with cryptography, globalization, numerics, collections and zip files, extended support for containers in the .NET SDK, and support for OpenAPI 3.1 in web applications.

• Node.js 24: New features include a new URLPattern added as a global object for further web compatibility, an update to the V8 JavaScript engine, and the permission model has been promoted out of experimental status and is now considered ready for production usage. This allows control of the Node.js process’ ability to access the file system through the fs module, spawn processes, use node:worker_threads, use native addons, use WASI, and enable the runtime inspector.

Latest updates to databases and tools

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7 has been updated with many developers’ favorite programming languages and databases. Notable changes include:

• **Valkey 8: **New features in Valkey 8 include Intelligent multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O threading which significantly improves performance, particularly for TLS connections, improved cluster scaling with automatic failover for new shards and replicated migration states, faster replication with dual-channel RDB and replica backlog streaming, improved per-slot and per-client metrics, providing granular visibility into performance and resource usage and up to 10% reduced memory overhead through optimized key storage.
• PostGIS extension for PostgreSQL database enables support for geographic objects in the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the OpenGIS “Simple Features Specification for SQL” and is certified as compliant with the “Types and Functions” profile. PostGIS spatially enables the PostgreSQL server, allowing usage as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI’s SDE or Oracle’s Spatial extension.

Post-quantum cryptography

With RHEL 9.7, Red Hat introduces PQC algorithms to RHEL 9. These algorithms enable secure key exchange, which is crucial for countering future threats from quantum computers. Key exchange enhances data integrity, and building it into RHEL 9.7 prepares your security infrastructure for emerging threats.

This is just the start for RHEL and PQC. Red Hat plans to continue adding algorithms to future releases to keep up with evolving security practices and compliance mandates.

More AI assistance

In RHEL 9.7, Red Hat is introducing an offline, locally available version of the RHEL command-line assistant. Now, users with a Red Hat Satellite subscription can get AI-powered RHEL guidance, even in a disconnected, or air-gapped environment. The locally available command-line assistant is currently in developer preview with a full rollout coming soon. With fully supported offline assistance, developers in government, defense, finance, and other tightly regulated industries can access AI-backed guidance without sacrificing compliance.

Another command line assistant improvement is an increased context limit, from 2KB to 32KB. With more working memory, the command-line assistant can analyze larger log files, pipe more complex data streams, retain more information across prompts, and ultimately take on more intricate tasks.

Reproducible image builds

Red Hat introduced image mode in RHEL 9.6 to simplify the process of deploying the operating system and layering applications on top of it. Whether deploying to virtualized machines, hardware, or public clouds, image mode was a welcome alternative to package-based. With RHEL 9.7, image mode now supports reproducible builds for container tools. That means container images built with identical content will yield identical images, with no timestamps or other metadata creating inconsistencies. Container images generated using RHEL’s container tools are now reproducible.

Hybrid cloud encryption and new telemetry support

OpenTelemetry Collector, included in RHEL 9 and 10 cloud images, now supports Trusted Platform Module (TPM) on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

TPM support helps protect cryptographic keys and attestation data that were previously stored only in software. Now, actions like key generation, signing, and system integrity checks can happen inside tamper-resistant hardware, improving the overall integrity of operations.

For cloud virtual machines, virtual TPM (vTPM) adds more protection. It supports secure identity verification, encrypted key storage, and compliance with strict security standards. This is especially important for regulated or multi-tenant workloads. Even in virtual environments, systems can now benefit from hardware-level security and verifiable integrity.

Try RHEL 9.7

We have presented the improvements packed into our latest update to RHEL 9.7. The official RHEL 9.7 documentation and release notes have more details about these new features in this edition. To experience them yourself, download RHEL 9.7 and get started.

Additional resources:

• RHEL 9.7 Product Download
• RHEL 9.7 Release Notes
• RHEL 9.7 Documentation