It’s business as usual for open-source software provider Red Hat Inc. as it edges closer to becoming a part of IBM Corp. following an acquisition announced late last year.

While the company works toward completing that deal, it has just shipped out yet another version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

RHEL 7.7 is now available in beta, offering a bunch of stability-focused updates for enterprises that are too cautious to move up to RHEL 8, which adds more new features and is already available in preview.

RHEL 7 continues to get updates because Red Hat has committed itself to providing long-term support the software until 2024. With that in mind, the latest update adds better support for new enterprise hardware systems. It also comes with fixes for the recently disclosed “ZombieLoad” vulnerabilities, which relate to flaws that were discovered in Intel Corp.’s computer chips and could enable hackers to steal corporate data.

Red Hat said RHEL users are now safe from these vulnerabilities, though the underlying chip problems mean that the fix might slow down some kinds of workloads, the company said.

Other improvements in RHEL 7.7 relate to the network stack. Now, users can offload their virtual switching operations to the network interface card hardware. This should benefit anyone using network function virtualization, which decouples network functions from proprietary hardware appliances so they can run in software on standardized hardware. Red Hat says that should ensure better network performance on cloud platforms such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and container platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.

The new release also bundles in Red Hat’s new Insights tool, which uses predictive analytics to discover and mitigate potential system problems before they do any damage.

The last notable update is support for Red Hat Image Builder, which was first seen in the RHEL 8 preview. Red Hat Image Builder is a tool that’s used to create RHEL system images for cloud and virtualization platforms such as Amazon Web Services, VMware vSphere and OpenStack more easily.

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