RHEL 7.4 Planned Changes

During the Red Hat summit 2017, Red Hat updated its RHEL roadmap, scheduling RHEL 7.4 for Q3 2017 and disclosing its main planned features:

• Stability & Ecosystem Enablement
  • Kdump-kexec: hw_iscsi, ibft, fcoe, persistent memory, MCE support
  • IBM: RHEL HA support extended to IBM Power 8
  • vGPU: using kernel VFIO/mdev (mediated device) framework
• Ecosystem Enablement – Public Cloud
  • Microsoft/Azure: TimeSync v4.0, WALA auto-update, cloud-init
  • Amazon/AWS: ENA (Elastic Network Adapter) driver
• Security Enhancements
  • Standards Compliance: OpenSCAP scanner NIST certified, DISA STIG profile included
  • Kernel: KASLR, YAMA security module, AVX-512, more entropy sources
  • Containers: SELinux on Overlayfs & Overlay2fs, IdM and SSSD in containers, User Namespaces
• Performance
  • Kernel: qspinlock, several real-time and Linux kernel fixes
  • Intel: Cache Allocation Technology
  • NVME over Fabric: lower latency than traditional SAN
  • Persistent memory storage technologies: NVDIMM
  • File systems: NFSoRDMA, NFS copy-offload
• Scalability
  • Max supported vCPUs increased to 288
  • Network: QinQ 802.1ad, great performance and HW offload
  • Persistent memory: block mode available for unmodified applications, byte mode for
    code tailored to make use of mmap, DAX for file systems to bypass page cache

Finally, according to this post, OpenSSL should be upgraded to 1.0.2k in RHEL 7.4.

Additional Resources

The head of Cryptography at RedHat, Dr Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, wrote an article about Enhancing the security of the OS with cryptography changes in RHEL 7.4.
Jacub Jelen, a software engineer in the RedHat Crypto team, wrote an article about the OpenSSH enhancements in RHEL 7.4.
Lucy Kerner from Red Hat wrote an article about the Built-in protection against USB security attacks with USBGuard in RHEL 7.4.
There were also improvements in Smart card support in RHEL7.4+.

Source: Red Hat Enterprise Linux roadmap.