Red Hat

What Version of RHEL am I Using?

Suparna Ganguly — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 17:00:00 +0000

RHEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the many operating systems provided by Red Hat. Red Hat is a popular Linux OS and has started functioning ever since the mid-1990s. Red Hat earned a good reputation due to being stable, regularly updated, and reliable.

If you are using RHEL and want to find its version, this article is for you. Now let’s check 7 useful methods to know what version of RHEL you are using.

Method 1: Track Your System with Hostnamectl

The hostnamectl command helps track your system’s appearance on a network. It also finds the operating system and its release version. So, this can be a quick way to check this information.

To use this command, open a terminal and type:

$ hostnamectl

In the output result, you’ll see the OS, kernel, and the architecture details.

Method 2: Use RPM Command

Red Hat Package Manager, abbreviated to RPM, is a well known core package management utility included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can identify the RHEL version you are using with this command.

Use RPM in the following manner.

$ rpm --query redhat-release

You can also identify CentOS’ (another OS offered by Red Hat) release version using the RPM command. To check, type:

$ rpm --query centos-release

As you enter the command suitable for your OS, the release version will appear on the screen.

Method 3: Check Red Hat Release File

Linux distributions based on Red Hat contain release files. You can find such files in the /etc/redhat-release directory. There are various types of Red hat release files, such as system-release, os-release, and redhat-release.

Check your Red Hat OS release version with the help of the below-given command.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release

To get more information, you can use the following commands.

$ cat /etc/system-release

$ cat /etc/os-release #contains more information

Method 4: Check within Red Hat Issue File

To check your Red Hat version, check within the /etc/issue file. To find the version, type:

$ cat /etc/issue

Method 5: Use lsb_release Command

LSB stands for Linux Standard Base. The lsb_release command shows the Linux distribution information and some LSB. On RHEL, the lsb_release is provided within the redhat_lsb. You can simply install the redhat_lsb package to use the command. To install, type:

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A Conversation with Kernel Developers from Intel, Red Hat and SUSE

Bryan Lunduke — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

Three kernel developers describe what it's really like to work on the kernel, how they interact with developers from other companies, some pet peeves and how to get started.

Like most Linux users, I rarely touch the actual code for the Linux kernel. Sure, I've looked at it. I've even compiled the kernel myself on a handful of occasions—sometimes to try out something new or simply to say I could do it ("Linux From Scratch" is a bit of a right of passage).

But, unless you're one of the Linux kernel developers, odds are you just don't get many opportunities to truly look "under the hood".

Likewise, I think for many Linux users (even the pro users, sysadmins and developers), the wild world of kernel development is a bit of a mystery. Sure, we have the publicly available Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML.org) that anyone is free to peruse for the latest features, discussions and (sometimes) shenanigans, but that gives only a glimpse at one aspect of being a kernel developer.

And, let's be honest, most of us simply don't have time to sift through the countless pull requests (and resulting discussions of said pull requests) that flood the LKML on a daily basis.

With that in mind, I reached out to three kernel developers—each working at some of the most prominent Linux contributing companies today—to ask them some basic questions that might provide a better idea of what being a Linux kernel developer is truly like: what their days look like and how they work with kernel developers at other companies.

Those three developers (in no particular order):

Dave Hansen, Principal Engineer, System Software Products at Intel.
Josh Poimboeuf, Principal Software Engineer on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Jeff Mahoney, Team Lead of Kernel Engineering at SUSE Labs.

Intel, Red Hat and SUSE—three of the top contributors of code to the Linux kernel. If anyone knows what it's like being a kernel developer, it's them.

I asked all three the exact same questions. Their answers are here, completely unmodified.

Bryan Lunduke: How long have you been working with the Linux kernel? What got you into it?

Dave Hansen (Intel): My first experience for the Linux kernel was a tiny little device driver to drive the eight-character display on an IBM PS/2, probably around 20 years ago. I mentioned the project on my college resume, which eventually led to a job with IBM's Linux Technology Center in 2001. IBM is where I started doing the Linux kernel professionally.

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IBM Began Buying Red Hat 20 Years Ago

Glyn Moody — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

How Big Blue became an open-source company.

News that IBM is buying Red Hat is, of course, a significant moment for the world of free software. It's further proof, as if any were needed, that open source has won, and that even the mighty Big Blue must make its obeisance. Admittedly, the company is not quite the behemoth it was back in the 20th century, when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". But it remains a benchmark for serious, mainstream—and yes, slightly boring—computing. Its acquisition of Red Hat for the not inconsiderable sum of $34 billion, therefore, proves that selling free stuff is now regarded as a completely normal business model, acknowledged by even the most conservative corporations.

Many interesting analyses have been and will be written about why IBM bought Red Hat, and what it means for open source, Red Hat, Ubuntu, cloud computing, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, amongst other things. But one aspect of the deal people may have missed is that in an important sense, IBM actually began buying Red Hat 20 years ago. After all, $34 billion acquisitions do not spring fully formed out of nowhere. Reaching the point where IBM's management agreed it was the right thing to do required a journey. And, it was a particularly drawn-out and difficult journey, given IBM's starting point not just as the embodiment of traditional proprietary computing, but its very inventor.

Even the longest journey begins with a single step, and for IBM, it was taken on June 22, 1998. On that day, IBM announced it would ship the Apache web server with the IBM WebSphere Application Server, a key component of its WebSphere product family. Moreover, in an unprecedented move for the company, it would offer "commercial, enterprise-level support" for that free software.

When I was writing my book Rebel Code: inside Linux and the open source revolution in 2000, I had the good fortune to interview the key IBM employees who made that happen. The events of two years before still were fresh in their minds, and they explained to me why they decided to push IBM toward the bold strategy of adopting free software, which ultimately led to the company buying Red Hat 20 years later.

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The Ceph Foundation and Building a Community: an Interview with SUSE

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

On November 12 at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany, the Linux foundation formally announced the Ceph Foundation. Present at this same summit were key individuals from SUSE and the SUSE Enterprise Storage team. For those less familiar with the SUSE Enterprise Storage product line, it is entirely powered by Ceph technology.

With Ceph, data is treated and stored like objects. This is unlike traditional (and legacy) data storage solutions, where data is written to and read from the storage volumes via sectors and at sector offsets (often referred to as blocks). When dealing with large amounts of large data, treating them as objects is the way to do it. It's also much easier to manage. In fact, this is how the cloud functions—with objects. This object-drive model enables Ceph for simplified scalability to meet consumer demand easily. These objects are replicated across an entire cluster of nodes, giving Ceph its fault-tolerance and further reducing single points of failure. The parent company of the project and its technology was acquired by Red Hat, Inc., in April 2014.

I was fortunate in that I was able to connect with a few key SUSE representatives for a quick Q & A, as it relates to this recent announcement. I spoke with Lars Marowsky-Brée, SUSE Distinguished Engineer and member of the governing board of the Ceph Foundation; Larry Morris, Senior Product Manager for SUSE Enterprise Storage; Sanjeet Singh, Solutions Owner for SUSE Enterprise Storage; and Michael Dilio, Product and Solutions Marketing Manager for SUSE Enterprise Storage.

Petros Koutoupis: How has IBM's recent Red Hat, Inc., acquisition announcement affected the Ceph project, and do you believe this is what led to the creation of the Ceph Foundation?

SUSE: With Ceph being an Open Source community project, there is no anticipated effect on the Ceph project as a result of the pending IBM acquisition of Red Hat. Discussions and planning of the Ceph foundation have been going on for some time and were not a result of the acquisition announcement.

PK: For some time, SUSE has been fully committed to the Ceph project and has even leveraged the same technology in its SUSE Enterprise Storage offering. Will these recent announcements impact both the offering and the customers using it?

SUSE: The Ceph Foundation news is a validation of the vibrancy of the Ceph community. There are 13 premier members, with SUSE being a founding and premier member.

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Oracle Patches Spectre for Red Hat

Charles Fisher — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 14:52:25 +0000

by Charles Fisher

Red Hat's Spectre remediation currently requires new microcode for a complete fix, which leaves most x86 processors vulnerable as they lack this update. Oracle has released new retpoline kernels that completely remediate Meltdown and Spectre on all compatible CPUs, which I show how to install and test on CentOS here.

The Red Hat community has patiently awaited a retpoline kernel implementation that remediates CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre v2) and closes all Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that have captured headlines this year.

Red Hat's initial fixes rely upon microcode updates for v2 remediation, a decision that leaves the vast majority of AMD64-capable processors in an exploitable state. Intel's new microcode has proven especially problematic; it performs badly and the January 2018 versions were plagued with stability issues that crashed many systems. It is a poor solution to a pressing problem.

Google's retpolines—an ingenious approach to v2—essentially play out the exploit within the Linux kernel in any and all vulnerable code. This method allows the kernel to retain complete control over speculative execution hardware in all architectures upon which it runs. It is faster and more generic than Intel's microcode and seems in every way a superior solution.

Oracle appears to be the first major member of the Red Hat community that has delivered a Linux kernel with retpoline support. The latest version of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel preview release 5 (UEKr5) now offers complete remediation for Meltdown and Spectre regardless of CPU microcode status. The UEKr5 is based on the mainline Linux kernel's long-term support branch v4.14 release. In late-breaking news, Oracle has issued a production release of the UEKr4 that also includes retpolines, details below. For corporate users and others with mandated patch schedules over a large number of servers, the UEK now seems to be the only solution for complete Spectre coverage on all CPUs. The UEK brings a number of other advantages over the "Red Hat-Compatible Kernel" (RHCK), but this patch response is likely to drive Oracle deeply into the Red Hat community should they remain the single source.

CentOS Installation

CentOS, Scientific and Oracle Linux are all based off the upstream provider Red Hat. CentOS is a popular variant and is likely the best demonstration for loading the UEK on a peer distro.

It appears that Red Hat itself has been laying groundwork for a retpoline kernel. A January 2018 gcc compiler update implies a successful backport:

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ZFS for Linux

Charles Fisher — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:54:56 +0000

by Charles Fisher

Presenting the Solaris ZFS filesystem, as implemented in Linux FUSE, native kernel modules and the Antergos Linux installer.

ZFS remains one of the most technically advanced and feature-complete filesystems since it appeared in October 2005. Code for Sun's original Zettabyte File System was released under the CDDL open-source license, and it has since become a standard component of FreeBSD and slowly migrated to various BSD brethren, while maintaining a strong hold over the descendants of OpenSolaris, including OpenIndiana and SmartOS.

Oracle is the owner and custodian of ZFS, and it's in a peculiar position with respect to Linux filesystems. Btrfs, the main challenger to ZFS, began development at Oracle, where it is a core component of Oracle Linux, despite stability issues Red Hat's recent decision to deprecate Btrfs likely introduces compatibility and support challenges for Oracle's Linux road map. Oracle obviously has deep familiarity with the Linux filesystem landscape, having recently released "dedup" patches for XFS. ZFS is the only filesystem option that is stable, protects your data, is proven to survive in most hostile environments and has a lengthy usage history with well understood strengths and weaknesses.

ZFS has been (mostly) kept out of Linux due to CDDL incompatibility with Linux's GPL license. It is the clear hope of the Linux community that Oracle will re-license ZFS in a form that can be included in Linux, and we should all gently cajole Oracle to do so. Obviously, a re-license of ZFS will have a clear impact on Btrfs and the rest of Linux, and we should work to understand Oracle's position as the holder of these tools. However, Oracle continues to gift large software projects for independent leadership. Incomplete examples of Oracle's largesse include OpenOffice and recently Java Enterprise Edition, so it is not inconceivable that Oracle's generosity may at some point extend additionally to ZFS.

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Meltdown/Spectre Status for Red Hat and Oracle

Charles Fisher — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 20:34:57 +0000

by Charles Fisher

The Red Hat family of operating systems addressed Meltdown and Spectre in its v3.10 kernel quickly, but relied too much upon Intel's flawed microcode and was forced to revert from a complete solution. Oracle implemented alternate approaches more suited to its v4.1 UEK, but both kernels continue to lack full Spectre coverage while they wait for Intel. Conspicuously absent from either Linux branch is Google's retpoline, which offers far greater and more efficient coverage for all CPUs. Auditing this status is a challenge. This article presents the latest tools for vulnerability assessments.

A frenzy of patch activity has surrounded this year's Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerability disclosures. Normally quiet microcode packages for Intel chips have seen four updates in the month of January, one of which was finally to roll back flawed code that triggers random reboots. For enterprise-grade hardware, Intel's quality control has left much to be desired.

It is likely premature to deploy new monitoring and compliance tools, and a final solution for this set of vulnerabilities will wait until correct microcode is obtained. Still, it may be important for many organizations to evaluate the patch status of servers running Linux kernels packaged by Oracle and/or Red Hat.

Meltdown patches exist now and should be deployed immediately on vulnerable servers. Remediating all Spectre vulnerabilities requires not only the latest kernels, but also a patched GCC to compile the kernel that is capable of implementing "retpolines", or compatible microcode from your CPU vendor.

RHCK

Red Hat was one of the first Linux distributions to publish guidance on Meltdown and Spectre. It established three files as "kernel tunables" in the /sys/kernel/debug/x86 directory to monitor and control these patches: pti_enabled for Meltdown, ibpb_enabled for Spectre v1 and ibrs_enabled for Spectre v2. Only the root user can access these files.

When these files contain a numerical zero, the patches are not active. If allowed for the CPU, a numerical one may be written to the file to enable the relevant remediation, and a zero may be written later to disable it. This is not always allowed—AMD processors are not vulnerable to Meltdown, and the value in the pti_enabled file is locked to zero and cannot be changed. If the fixes are active and show 1, the performance of the CPU may be reduced. Compatible microcode is required to enable all patches on vulnerable CPUs, which adds new assembler/machine language op codes that erase vulnerable kernel data from CPU pipelines and caches to close the exploit.

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Red Hat OpenStack Platform

James Gray — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:05:31 +0000

by James Gray

The adoption of OpenStack in production environments has burgeoned, necessitating increased requirements for enhanced management and seamlessly integrated enterprise capabilities.

Numerous enterprises worldwide rely on Red Hat's offerings in the OpenStack space—that is, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments.

The updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, based on the "Mitaka" release from the upstream OpenStack community, brings technical updates across the board, encompassing nearly all of the major OpenStack projects, and features integrated management for OpenStack through Red Hat CloudForms. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 builds on the proven, trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide critical dependencies needed in production OpenStack environments centered around service functionality, third-party drivers, and system performance and security.

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Daily Giveaway - Fun Prizes from Red Hat!

Carlie Fairchild — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:35:30 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Red Hat is giving away prizes to Linux Journal readers through the end of October. Enter to win! Each day we'll be giving away some pretty cool Red Hat tumblers or scarves, with the grand finale prize of a Red Hat Video Classroom Course of your choice -- a value up to $3,500!

Enter to win now! As an added bonus, EVERYONE who enters to win will receive free access to the entire Linux Journal digital archive -- well over 200 issues!

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ACI Worldwide's UP Retail Payments

James Gray — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 17:45:00 +0000

by James Gray

As customers of global-payments solution provider ACI Worldwide retire aging platforms, they are clamoring for Linux-based options. ACI Worldwide has responded with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux version of UP Retail Payments, a complete and customizable end-to-end enterprise payments solution. UP Retail Payments, targeted at banks and processors, combines the benefits of ACI's BASE24 and UP BASE24-eps solutions. BASE24 is ACI's retail payment platform; UP Framework orchestrates any payment type, channel, currency or network.

ACI's approach with this solution is like a bridge between BASE24 customers' current systems and evolving end-user demands, enabling them to continue running some or all of their systems into the foreseeable future. This strategy lowers risk and costs, adds ACI, eliminating the need to "rip and replace" systems to address emerging payment needs. ACI emphasizes the advantages of the new RHEL version of UP Retail Payments, such as a 50% reduction in TCO while increasing performance, scalability and reliability.

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