Identification and RPM Modules

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8) and RPM Modules

In RHEL8 Red Hat introduced a concept called "modules". Besides individual RPM packages, the AppStream repository in RHEL 8 contains modules.

A module is a set of RPM packages that represent a component and are usually installed together. A typical module contains packages with an application, packages with the application-specific dependency libraries, packages with documentation for the application, and packages with helper utilities.

Learn more about modules - RHEL8: Intro to RPM Modules

In order to correctly identify the Red Hat RPM module version, taking into consideration backporting fixes, continue to use the RPM commands.

Example:

In this example we are listing all "nodejs" packages/ modules from container image: "registry.redhat.io/ubi8/nodejs-10:1-108"

The rpm -qa command is used to list all the packages/ modules.

One of the RPM modules listed in this example is following:

module name= nodejs, module version = 12.18.2-1.module+el8.2.0+7233+61d664c1.x86_64

• Version= 12.18.2; The version of the open source project used to make this module

• Extra Version= 1.module+el8.2.0; The extra version being applied by the Red Hat maintainer of this RPM as a result of backporting fixes

• Architecture= x86_64; The CPU type the binaries contained in this module are compiled for

The rpm -ql command is used to list all the files in the module:

Clair v4 Implementation: How Clair processes modules.

*Clair compares the module versions the same way as it compares regular RPMs.