Red Hat today made available an update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system that embeds generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities along with other capabilities to simplify administration.

Announced at the Red Hat Summit conference, RHEL 10 includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed, which is based on a set of large language models (LLMs) that Red Hat and its parent company IBM have been training to automate a wide range of IT tasks.

Raj Das, a senior director for product management at Red Hat, said that capability will reduce the level of expertise currently required to manage operating systems using AI models that have been trained using Red Hat documentation.

At the same time, Red Hat is now making it possible to deploy RHEL as a container image. That capability will make it simpler to include RHEL within a set of programmable DevOps workflows to deploy an operating system alongside application software in a way that minimizes configuration drift. Red Hat is also providing integrations with its open source Podman tools for building and managing containers and making available pre-tuned RHEL 10 images across cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft.

RHEL 10 also adds a tool that surfaces image builder package recommendations using Red Hat Insights, an analytics and observability platform. Red Hat Insights also provides a view into the RHEL roadmap and lifecycle to aid upgrade planning. Red Hat in collaboration with SiFive is also previewing an instance of RHEL 10 for platforms based on the RISC-V instruction set that promises to make it simpler to deploy workloads on any class of processors.

Additionally, Red Hat also revealed it has added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to RHEL 10. Originally developed by Anthropic, MCP is emerging as a de facto standard for integrating AI workloads that Red Hat hopes will be deployed more frequently on RHEL 10 using the Red Hat Inference Server also launched today.

Finally, RHEL 10 now complies with the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance for post-quantum cryptography and is previewing a RHEL Security Select Add-On, which provides the ability to request fixes for up to 10 specific Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) annually.

It’s not clear how quickly existing Red Hat customers will migrate to RHEL 10 but it’s clear the management of operating systems is about to become much more automated in the age of AI. The challenge IT administrators will face is determining to what degree to rely on AI to automate routine tasks. Given the potential for hallucinations, IT administrators will still be needed to review any recommendations before implementation, especially when managing mission-critical applications that, if interrupted, will negatively impact the business and the reputation of the internal IT team that manage them.

Hopefully, there will come a day soon when many of the tedious tasks that conspire to make being an IT administrator more challenging than it needs to be will soon be sharply reduced if not outright eliminated. In the meantime, however, IT teams might want to revisit which providers of those operating systems are doing everything they can to help realize that ambition.