The release of Rocky Linux 10.0 has taken place, developing a free build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux capable of replacing classic CentOS. The distribution is binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and can be used as a substitute for RHEL 10 and CentOS 10 Stream. Support for the Rocky Linux 10 branch will be provided until 2035. Installation ISO images of Rocky Linux have been prepared for architectures x86-64-v3, aarch64, ppc64le (IBM POWER), s390x (IBM Z), and riscv64. Additionally, live builds with GNOME and KDE desktops are offered, published for the x86_64 architecture.
As with classic CentOS, the changes made in Rocky Linux packages mainly involve eliminating the branding of Red Hat and removing RHEL-specific packages, such as redhat-*, insights-client, and subscription-manager-migration*. A review of the changes in Rocky Linux 10.0 can be found in the RHEL 10.0 announcement. The release includes only 64-bit package builds; all 32-bit packages have been removed (to run 32-bit programs, it is recommended to use containers with 32-bit dependencies).
Among the specific changes for Rocky Linux, official support for the RISC-V architecture has been implemented for StarFive VisionFive 2 (VF2) and SiFive HiFive Premier P550 boards, as well as running in the QEMU emulator. Additionally, the project is developing several of its own repositories with additional packages:
- plus — currently only the package with the Valkey 8.0.3 DBMS (a fork of Redis) is available.
- NFV — packages for virtualizing network components, developed by the SIG group NFV (Network Functions Virtualization).
- CRB (Code Ready Builder) — additional packages for developers.
- RT — packages for real-time operation.
- HighAvailability and ResilientStorage are packages for creating highly reliable systems.
- SAP and SAPHANA — packages for SAP and SAP HANA, such as resource-agents, sap-hana-ha, sap-cluster-connector, and vhostmd.
The OpenELA repository, maintained in cooperation with Oracle and SUSE, was used as the source of the source packages when forming Rocky Linux 10. The change in development processes is due to Red Hat's cessation of hosting the source texts of RHEL RPM packages in the public repository git.centos.org. Source packages are provided to clients of the company only through the closed section of the site, which has a user agreement (EULA) prohibiting the redistribution of the data, thus preventing these packages from being used to create derivative distributions. The source texts remain available in the CentOS Stream repository, but it is not fully synchronized with RHEL and the newest versions of packages do not always match those from RHEL.
The Rocky Linux distribution is developed under the auspices of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), registered as a Public Benefits Corporation, focused on public good rather than profit. The organization's owner is Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, but management functions are delegated to a board of directors elected by community members involved in the project. Concurrently, to develop extended products based on Rocky Linux and to support the community of developers of this distribution, a commercial company, Ctrl IQ, has been established and has received $26 million in investments. Companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, GitLab, MontaVista, 45Drives, OpenDrives, and NAVER Cloud have joined the development and financing of the project.
Source: opennet.ru
