More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 3)

This series takes a look at the people and planning that went into building and releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. From the earliest conceptual stages to the launch at Red Hat Summit 2025, we’ll hear firsthand accounts of how RHEL 10 came into being.

Part 1 | Part 2

In our previous installment of the story of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 came to be, we learned about a new approach to building the platform. In part 3, the team focuses on the delicate balancing act of keeping thousands of moving parts in sync while features like image mode and RHEL Lightspeed (and the stories we’ll tell about them) start to take shape.

2023 (18 months until Summit 2025)

Mike McGrath, vice president, Core Platforms Engineering 

This is when things really start to kick into overdrive. The big thing that we watch for internally is what we call the compose. The compose is basically a nightly—or roughly, it could be a few times a day—build of the latest and greatest in RHEL. That’s what I always look to to see how things are going. 

Major Hayden, senior principal software engineer

It’s kind of like a Jenga tower where all the pieces are slightly different sizes. And so you may look at it and say, ‘Well, my piece is really small. You can poke this thing out and nothing will fall.’ And everyone around you is saying, ‘I believe you, but we’re going to have to check.’ Because if it does fall over, then we’ve got problems.

McGrath

There are some things that, if we break it, we simply cannot get a compose out anymore, which means nobody can do their tests in a really good and authentic way. There will be times, especially in those early days, where we’ll go weeks at a time without getting a successful compose. 

Hayden

Sometimes when you jostle one part of the stack they have to go test half of the rest of the stack to make sure it still works. Sometimes you get lucky and you can jiggle something and it doesn’t affect anybody else, but sometimes that’s not the case.

McGrath

When those composes aren’t working, it has real impact on real teams. That’s one of those internal things that we need to keep everybody in sync with.

2024 (12 months until Summit 2025)

Brian Stinson, principal software engineer

Things like image mode, the post quantum [cryptography] stuff that we talked about at Summit—all of those things actually came relatively late in the release process.

Chris Wells, senior director, Product Marketing - RHEL Business Unit

We’re working with the product management team, we’re seeing what’s going on, trying to figure out what’s the story of that particular release. But it’s not until you get about a year out that things start to become solid enough that you can start to figure out what the story is.

Hayden

I think it was known at Summit [2024] that we were going to make the promise that we were going to have RHEL Lightspeed, but I don’t think anybody really knew what it was. We didn’t want to create something like a Clippy. We wanted to make something helpful, but not that. I think the question was, well, what even makes sense? What are people going to want to know? And then how do we deliver that in a way that’s relevant for them?

Stef Walter, senior director, Linux Engineering

Image mode was one of those things where [CEO] Matt Hicks challenged us in October of 2023. He called it the moonshot when he challenged everyone to pull this off. And he challenged everyone to pull it off for Summit [2024], which we did as a tech preview.

Hayden

I think the decision was made early that [Lightspeed should] target the people that have their hands on RHEL all day long. Let’s not target the decision makers or executives. Let’s target the men and women who are sitting in front of a keyboard, and try and figure out some way to not only answer their questions and fix their problems, but help them get into the Red Hat way of doing things. It was an upsell thing, it was an educational thing, and it was also something to add value into RHEL. That’s how we first started talking about it.

Wells

[We] spend a lot of time talking with the product managers to understand what these features and capabilities were designed for. And in an ideal scenario, you try to take an outside-in approach. You’re trying to understand what the customer or user or partner or whoever you’re marketing this thing to—what do they care about? What’s their challenge? What are they faced with? Because you have to make it meaningful to them.

At this point in time, it’s less than a year from the general availability of RHEL 10. Features are being honed, use cases are determined and an entire system of launch mechanisms is coming up to speed - with Red Hat Summit 2025 in sight.