RHEL 10.1 Soft Reboot Slashes Downtime for Updates
ATLANTA — Red Hat officially released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1 at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America. This is the first major update in the 10.X series, which brings a host of new features aimed at modern enterprises, AI workloads, and enhanced security.
The standout AI feature in RHEL 10.1 is the introduction of an offline, locally available AI command-line assistant. Red Hat’s local version of Lightspeed in RHEL 10.1 enables users of the Red Hat Satellite system administration tool to access AI-powered guidance and recommendations for Linux administration, troubleshooting, and configuration tasks. The assistant’s context window has been expanded from 2KB to 32KB, enabling users to process much longer logs and more complex command sequences.This AI preview release can help you even with air-gapped, disconnected servers.
Vendor-Validated AI Accelerator Drivers
Red Hat is making vendor-validated AI accelerator drivers available via the RHEL Extensions Repository and Supplementary Repository. To keep up to date with AI drivers for graphics processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs), and other app-specific integration circuits (ASICs), RHEL 10.1 includes: Nvidia’s OpenRM kernel mode driver and CUDA toolkit; AMD’s amdgpu kernel mode driver and ROCml; and Intel’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU) kernel mode driver.
Of course, the new release also comes with updates for bread-and-butter programming tools. RHEL 10.1 includes the latest versions of leading programming languages and runtimes. These include Go 1.24, Node.js 24, .NET 10, and OpenJDK 25, along with new enhancements in Rust and better container lifecycle management with a streamlined CLI for RHEL’s image builder.
Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS and Enhancements
Under the hood, RHEL 10.1 ships with the Linux kernel version 6.12 Long Term Support LTS. Specifically, it comes with 6.12.0-124.8.1.el10_1, which includes extensive Red Hat-specific patches to support enterprise features and stability.
RHEL 10.1 also incorporates kernel-focused enhancements, such as expanded support for perf and BPF, improved energy tracking for Intel and AMD hardware, and modernized debugging options. These improvements provide system administrators with deeper insights and enhanced resource management in production environments.
Soft-Reboot Capability for Reduced Downtime
With RHEL 10.1, Red Hat debuts a new “soft-reboot” capability in systemd image mode. A soft reboot enables administrators to update or reset applications and userspace components without fully rebooting the kernel, thereby sharply reducing downtime during updates and patching. This feature is intended to enhance operational agility and improve uptime across production environments.
The soft-reboot feature comes after Red Hat decided to adopt an optional immutable approach for packaging in RHEL 10. With that release, it became possible to update both the operating system and application layers as a single containerized image. Of course, if you prefer, you can still use traditional RPM packaging.
Reproducible Container Builds
Moving along with containers, RHEL 10.1 introduces reproducible builds for container tools within image mode. Now, container images built from identical content yield byte-for-byte identical results, including metadata. This change tightens security, increases reliability, and improves operational consistency.
Enhanced Security With Post-Quantum Cryptography
On the security front, RHEL 10.1 advances Red Hat’s post-quantum cryptography strategy by integrating post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms for TLS and enhancing TPM support in the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Sounds interesting? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 is available now for supported users, offering a robust and consistent platform for hybrid clouds, AI workloads, and the next generation of enterprise computing.
