Rocky Linux 9.4 Released as Another Free Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Distro

This release adds openSUSE's KIWI next-generation appliance builder as a new image build workflow and process.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Rocky Linux 9.4

The Rocky Linux release engineering team announced the general availability of Rocky Linux 9.4 as yet another free alternative to the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 operating system.

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, Rocky Linux 9.4 introduces new image builder features like the ability to specify arbitrary custom mount points except for specific paths that are reserved for the operating system, create different partitioning modes, and customize tailor options for profiles and add them to your blueprint customizations by using selected and unselected options to add and remove rules.

Rocky Linux 9.4 also adds openSUSE‘s KIWI next-generation appliance builder as a new image build workflow and process for building images that are feature complete with the old images. However, Image Factory is still being used for building Vagrant-VBox, Vagrant-VMware, and OCP-Base (Oracle Cloud Platform) images.

“The remaining Cloud, Container, and Vagrant images were built using KIWI. The new build workflow will enable Rocky Linux to provide more frequent updates to our images on all cloud providers,” explained the devs.

This release also changes the Rocky Linux publisher account for Azure Marketplace and deprecates previous images. The Azure images of Rocky Linux are now published under the resf name. Also, to make it easier to run Rocky Linux on Azure, images are now freely available on the Azure Community Gallery.

Under the hood, Rocky Linux 9.4 includes the same updated components from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, such as SELinux 3.6, GnuTLS 3.8.3, nettle 3.9.1, p11-kit 0.25.3, libkcapi 1.4.0, stunnel 5.71, audit 3.1.2, Rsyslog 8.2310, SCAP Security Guide 0.1.72, openCryptoki 3.22.0, synce4l 1.0.0, chrony 4.5, linuxptp 4.2, elfutils 0.190, Go 1.21.0, Rust 1.75.0, LLVM 17.0.6, Git 2.43.0, Python 3.12, firewalld 1.3, nftables 1.0.9, iptables 1.8.10, PostgreSQL 16, MariaDB 10.11, nginx 1.24, PHP 8.2, Ruby 3.3.0, GCC 13, and Linux kernel 5.14.0-427.13.1.

If you’re looking for a 100% free Red Hat Enterprise Linux alternative, you can download Rocky Linux 9.4 for 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures right now from the official website. Don’t forget to check out the release notes for known issues and other details about this release.

Image credits: Rocky Linux (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 1 week ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com