Today, we are proud to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.3 and RHEL 9.9. Today’s launch is about reinforcing the platform’s foundation to meet the evolving security, operational, and AI-driven demands of the modern enterprise.
RHEL 10.3 and 9.9 deliver on this necessity by integrating zero trust architectures, and strengthening digital sovereignty, all while providing AI-augmented, production-ready diagnostic tools and upholding the uncompromising stability our customers expect.
Proactive defense in the AI era
AI-driven threats move with unprecedented speed, which means traditional security is no longer enough. Red Hat has shifted toward a model of proactive resilience, where security is fundamentally integrated with intelligence. By using AI-augmented diagnostics to predict vulnerabilities and implement automated, intelligent remediation, we are defending infrastructure while actively hardening it against the next generation of sophisticated threats.
Sealed images for image mode
Maintaining consistent security postures across massive, distributed fleets—from data centers to the edge—is a continuous challenge. Proving that running system content matches what was originally deployed is an ongoing operational burden. With today’s release, sealed images for image mode (now generally available in RHEL 10.3) deliver end-to-end cryptographic integrity protection, extending verification across your entire OS configuration, from firmware and bootloader to the kernel and root filesystem using your own secure boot keys. By holding the operating system (OS) content to the exact signed state and enforcing a read-only root filesystem, tampered content is refused by the kernel at read time rather than served. This establishes the cryptographic foundation required for a zero trust architecture, immediately detecting unauthorized modifications, accelerating delivery with a preverified OS foundation, and simplifying compliance for financial, healthcare, and government sectors.
MCP Server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: AI-assisted management, ready for production
Today marks a significant milestone by moving the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for RHEL from Developer Preview to general availability.
This is a production-ready foundation that connects AI assistants directly to RHEL system data, enabling intelligent, automated diagnostics. We have simplified adoption by packaging the MCP server as an RPM in the RHEL extensions repository, allowing you to install it alongside goose, our extensible, open source AI command-line agent, using standard dnf commands. By integrating historical Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) data, your AI assistants now analyze past performance events to more quickly identify root causes of intermittent issues, without the need for manual, tedious data correlation.
Self-managed command-line assistant capabilities for regulated and disconnected environments (Developer Preview)
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux command-line assistant remains the natural-language assistant for the terminal, helping close the Linux skills gap with guidance informed by Red Hat knowledge. Customers will be able to run the assistant in a self-managed way using their own customer-hosted inference. This keeps model guidance, sensitive operational context, and digital sovereignty inside secure, air-gapped, or disconnected perimeters (currently in Developer Preview). Red Hat’s hosted path remains available for connected estates.
Accelerating developer innovation
While security provides the foundation, developer velocity drives the business forward. RHEL 10.3 and 9.9 introduce a solid suite of developer enhancements to accelerate modern application development without sacrificing the platform’s legendary stability.
We are shipping updated toolsets, including GCC 16, LLVM 22, and Go 1.27, which provide faster build times and highly optimized binaries. Developers can now use the modern features in .NET 11, Node.js 26 (LTS), and PHP 8.4 to significantly improve both performance and code capability.
Security remains paramount for developers as well. The update to Rust 1.97 offers the memory-safety protections critical for mitigating common vulnerabilities, while new post-quantum cryptography (PQC) support helps regulated customers proactively meet CNSA 2.0 compliance requirements. Furthermore, new grafana-pcp AI dashboards unify GPU, CPU, and network performance telemetry, simplifying monitoring for the growing number of AI/ML teams working on RHEL.
A trusted foundation for the future
Red Hat is focused on helping organizations navigate complex system lifecycles. Today, we introduce validated, supported upgrade paths via Leapp for transitions from RHEL 9.9 to 10.3 and RHEL 8.10 to 9.9. These standard routes reduce complexity and operational risk, ensuring your upgrades are predictable, supported, and efficient.
Combined with our long-standing commitment to RHEL Extended Life Cycle, Premium and the RHEL Long-Life Add-On, we provide the tools and dedication necessary for you to build your business on a trusted, resilient, and supported platform.
Whether you’re modernizing your fleet or maintaining established infrastructure, RHEL 10.3 and 9.9 position the OS as a proactive asset. We are building the foundation for a zero trust hybrid cloud where credentials are cryptographically proven and digital sovereignty is maintained, helping your infrastructure adapt, endure, and thrive.