More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 4)
Source: Red Hat Blog
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.
In our previous installment of the story of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 came to be, we got insights into the testing process and how the headline features (and the stories around those features) started coming together. In Part 4, those stories come into clearer focus as the team works to put the finishing touches on various features before code freeze.
2025 – Six months until Summit 2025
Brian Stinson, Principal Software Engineer
“The last stretch of time: that part is actually where things get a little bit more intense for the individual teams because it’s not only ‘Are we buttoning up features?’ but ‘Were we able to cover the rest of the baseline enablement stuff we needed to do as part of the release?’
Are all my packages in? Did we get them QE’d on the right schedule? Have they gone out for feedback? Those types of activities actually ramp up quite a bit as we head toward code freeze.”
Chris Wells, Senior Director, Product Marketing – RHEL Business Unit
“I knew we needed to take this story and try and make it exciting. But we weren’t going to change what features were in this release; we could only change how we talked about those features.
So I had a meeting here in Columbus where I pulled in Marty Loveless, the lead product‑marketing manager on RHEL 10, and Scott McCarty, who lives just an hour or two up the road in Akron. He drove down for the day. We locked ourselves in a conference room and just brainstormed ‘what were the different angles we could talk about things in?’ Trying to look at something that was new and figure out: Was there a different angle?”
Major Hayden, Senior Principal Software Engineer
“It was another Red Hatter and I on the engineering side building the code, so he and I divided the work. RAG [retrieval‑augmented generation] was our number‑one challenge. We kind of assumed that it was: ‘You throw a bunch of PDFs in a bucket, boom, let’s search.’ That was not correct.
A lot of the challenge stemmed from the fact that it was the first time many of us had ever dealt with vectors. I took calculus back in school, so I know vectors are a line on a Cartesian plane, but that’s about it. How are these sentences becoming vectors? It didn’t make any sense, so I actually had to sit down one day and relearn some calculus to figure out what was really happening.
Then the biggest roadblock we hit was that we weren’t getting quality results.
We read a blog post where someone suggested asking the LLM to refine the customer’s question. We eventually created a question‑refinement process: we take the customer’s question, send it to an LLM, and ask, ‘Is this question likely about RHEL, Red Hat products, or Linux? Can you turn it into five more specific questions with keywords that line up with these topics?’
For example, a customer might say, “SSH no restart.” The refinement step would turn that into several more specific queries that contain phrases likely to appear in our RAG content. The vector search then matches more documents, and suddenly we started seeing much better results.”
Chris Wells (continued)
“Really being able to take what I think is the unique differentiator for Red Hat in the marketplace—all of our knowledge and expertise around Linux for RHEL—and productize it as an assistant via Lightspeed gave us a powerful way to talk about RHEL 10.”
Stef Walter, Senior Director, Linux Engineering
“Our customers—big‑name customers—were deploying image mode before it was officially supported. They were like, ‘This is so great, we don’t care. We’re deploying it now.’
When it really started to hit home was the surprise of, ‘Oh wow, they’re deploying it in production and they’re not waiting for us.’ This is so valuable to them in their IT process and the change they are trying to make that they won’t wait for us. Now we’ve got to keep up.”
Chris Wells (again)
“We had this really powerful story around image mode. We said, ‘What if we talk about image mode as a different way to patch and update your systems?’
Over the last year we’d been talking about image mode mainly as a way to deploy new systems, new images, and edge deployments—all perfectly valid.
But then we thought, ‘What if we took it one step further? What if, instead of just deploying to the edge, you literally created an image of a production server, made it immutable, and deployed it that way?’
Whenever you need to update that server, you just update the image and re‑image the system. It becomes a different way to deploy, removing one of the huge headaches of managing Linux systems—patching. Patch management through image mode would be a lot easier, quicker, and less risky than the traditional package‑based approach.”
We’re now almost at the point of RHEL 10 launching at Summit 2025—that’s the easy part, right? …right?!
Look for the next post in 2025 as the team walks us through the actual launch mechanisms and production rollout.