More Signs Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Alpha Being Inbound

Public details are still scarce about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, but it's looking like the alpha release might not be too far out.

Generally it's been three to four years between major releases of Red Hat Enterpriser Linux, with the RHEL 7 release being back in June of 2014 for reference. Major versions of RHEL are also generally introduced when the current stable series is up to around its fifth point release (and surprise surprise, RHEL 7.5 is in beta). Long story short, it would be incredibly odd if we at least didn't start seeing public alpha/beta releases this year.

But we are seeing more signs recently of "RHEL8" including a Phoronix reader pointing out now that for Red Hat's Anaconda installer there is now a rhel8-alpha-branch. That RHEL 8 alpha branch of the Anaconda installer doesn't reveal much about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 itself. But it does go ahead and remove Btrfs support, which we've been expecting. Red Hat deprecated Btrfs last year in RHEL 7 with no longer pursuing that Linux file-system and with RHEL8 the installation option is being gutted.

In place of their Btrfs dreams for next-gen Linux storage, Red Hat is working on Stratis but it's not clear if that will be ready in time for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 or will just be worked in as a tech preview.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on workstations, it's expected that it will default to a GNOME Wayland session. Wayland is in tech preview form with RHEL 7.5 and given Fedora using GNOME on Wayland the past few releases to great success, it's no surprise they would default to it on RHEL8 Workstations.

As far as other changes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we'll need to just wait and see but one can always look at the recent Fedora releases to see what Red Hat developers have been working on upstream. It will certainly be interesting times with this next round of enterprise operating system releases with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS coming next month, Windows Server 2019 going GA in the second half of this year, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 releasing this summer.