Red Hat introduces Arm server support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Today marks a milestone for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the addition of a new architecture to our list of fully supported platforms. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM is a part of our multi-architecture strategy and the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with the upstream community and our silicon and hardware partners.

The Arm ecosystem has emerged over the last several years with server-optimized SoC (system on chip) products that are designed for cloud and hyperscale, telco and edge computing, as well as high-performance computing applications. Arm SoC designs take advantage of advances in CPU technology, system-level hardware, and packaging to offer additional choices to customers looking for tightly integrated hardware solutions.

Red Hat took a pragmatic approach to Arm servers by helping to drive open standards and develop communities of customers, partners and a broad ecosystem. Our goal was to develop a single operating platform across multiple 64-bit ARMv8-A server-class SoCs from various suppliers while using the same sources to build user functionality and consistent feature set that enables customers to deploy across a range of server implementations while maintaining application compatibility.

In 2015, we introduced a Development Preview of the operating system to silicon partners, such as Cavium and Qualcomm, and OEM partners, like HPE, that designed and built systems based on a 64-bit Arm architecture. A great example of this collaboration was the advanced technology demonstration by HPE, Cavium, and Red Hat at the International Supercomputing conference in June 2017. That prototype solution became part of HPE’s Apollo 70 system, announced today. If you are attending SuperComputing17 this week, please stop by Red Hat’s booth (#1763) to learn more about this new system.

Red Hat’s focus is to provide software support for multiple architectures powered by a single operating platform - Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and driven by open innovation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM, the first commercial release for this architecture, provides customers who have been planning to run their workloads and software and hardware partners that require a stable operating environment to continue development, with a proven and more secure enterprise-grade platform. We plan to continue our work with the ecosystem to expand the reach for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM.

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are also shipping Red Hat Software Collections 3, Red Hat Developer Toolset 7 and single host KVM virtualization (as an unsupported Development preview) for this architecture.

To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM, see the release notes at https://access.redhat.com/articles/3158541