use RHEL image builder to create disk images with advanced partitioning.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7
Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7

Major changes in RHEL 9.7
Key highlights for RHEL image builder:

• You can use RHEL image builder to create disk images with advanced partitioning.
• You can customize your blueprint to enable injecting a Kickstart file when building ISO images.
• System images created with the RHEL image builder, such as AWS or KVM formats, do not have a separate /boot partition.
• RHEL Image Builder now supports WSL2 images.

Security
The system-wide cryptographic policies introduce the PQ subpolicy to enable post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms and contain many improvements to support PQC in applications.

OpenSSL 3.5 introduces support for the ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA post-quantum algorithms and adds the hybrid ML-KEM algorithms to the default TLS group list.

Kernel
RHEL 9.7 adds kernel-area improvements that advance performance analysis and energy telemetry. Updates include a refined jitter entropy source in rng-tools, upstream alignment for perf and BPF to v6.14 and v6.15, expanded uncore and core event counters, Intel RAPL energy events, Intel Trace Hub (NPK) device IDs, and refreshed crash analysis and python-drgn tooling. NVMe‑TCP kdump to an NVMe namespace can fail in some environments. Apply operational caution where this limitation is relevant.

Node.js 24
See New features - Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers and Technology Previews - Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers for more information.

Compilers and development tools
Updated system toolchain
The following system toolchain components have been updated:

• Glibc 2.34
• Annobin 12.98
  Updated performance tools and debuggers
  The following performance tools and debuggers have been updated in RHEL 9.7:
• GDB 16.3
• Valgrind 3.25.1
• SystemTap 5.3
• Dyninst 13.0.0
• elfutils 0.193
• libabigail 2.8
  Updated performance monitoring tools

The following performance monitoring tools have been updated in RHEL 9.7:

• PCP 6.3.7
• Grafana 10.2.6
  .NET 10.0 is now available on RHEL
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports .NET, a general-purpose development platform that features automatic memory management and modern programming languages, allowing you to build high-quality applications efficiently. This update adds support for the most recent version, .NET 10.0 (Long-Term Support), expanding the versions available on RHEL. Other supported versions include .NET 9.0 (Standard-Term Support) and the previous long-term support version, .NET 8.0.

Updated compiler toolsets
The following compiler toolsets have been updated in RHEL 9.7:

• GCC Toolset 15
  GCC 15.1
  Binutils 2.44

Note that Annobin and dwz are not provided in GCC Toolset starting with version 15.

• LLVM Toolset 20.1.8
• Rust Toolset 1.88.0
• Go Toolset 1.24

The web console
The cockpit packages have been upgraded to version 344, which provides many improvements, most notably the upgrade to the Patternfly 6 system design.