Release presented Rocky Linux 10.2, continuing the development of the free enterprise distribution developed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. The project has prepared new installation images, container, cloud, and live builds. The official announcement is dated May 28, 2026, and release documentation updated on May 29.
Rocky Linux 10.2 continues the line of enterprise Linux-compatible systems, bringing primarily updates in cryptography, development tools, server components, container subsystems, and administration tools. The upgrade from Rocky Linux 10.0 and 10.1 is performed normally through dnf -y upgrade, but moving from Rocky Linux 8 or 9 to 10.x is still not supported as an in-place upgrade: a clean installation with data restoration from a backup is recommended.
Key changes
Post-quantum cryptography. OpenSSH has gained support for hybrid key exchange ML-KEM in FIPS mode, libssh — hybrid PQ/T methods of key exchange, Directory Server — TLS certificates with ML-DSA keys, and p11-kit — definitions of PQC in PKCS #11 headers. An important change: the system cryptographic policy FUTURE now only allows hybrid ML-KEM key exchange algorithms, which may break connections with nodes not supporting PQC. The DEFAULT policy is not affected by this change.
Firefox and Thunderbird via Flatpak. When installing the graphical environment, Anaconda now defaults to installing Flatpak versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. RPM packages remain available in AppStream throughout the lifecycle of Rocky Linux 10, and administrators can override this behavior through Kickstart.
Updated server components. PostgreSQL 18, MariaDB 11.8, and PHP 8.4 have been added to the repository; chrony has been updated to 4.8 and FRR to 10.4.1. It is noted in the known issues that due to the simultaneous availability of PHP 8.3 and 8.4, dependencies such as php-json need to be carefully matched to the installed PHP version.
Development tools. Included are GCC Toolset 15 with GCC 15.2 and Binutils 2.44, LLVM Toolset 21.1.8, Rust Toolset 1.92.0, and Go Toolset 1.26.x. GDB 16.3, SystemTap 5.4, elfutils 0.194, and libabigail 2.9 have also been updated.
Kernel and performance. The kernel has expanded perf capabilities, added new performance events for Intel platforms, included AMD IBS load latency filtering, updates for Intel QAT and AMD cryptographic devices, enhancements for realtime analysis via rtla and cpupower, as well as improvements to kdump for LUKS-enabled systems. The asynchronous io_uring interface is available as a technology preview.
Containers. Podman has switched from GnuPG to Sequoia-PGP for OpenPGP signature verification of images and added support for post-quantum signature algorithms. Version 5.8.2 of Podman also introduced automatic migration from BoltDB to SQLite upon restart, the podman quadlet install command, a REST API for quadlet, and a restart policy of unless-stopped that persists after reboots.
FreeIPA, Directory Server, and Samba. IdM/FreeIPA has been updated to 4.13.0, which includes a new web interface based on Cockpit in technology preview status and over 170 fixes. Directory Server has received support for PQC, dynamic groups, and updates for TLS certificates without downtime and replication conflict resolution. Samba has been updated to 4.23.0, with experimental support for SMB3-over-QUIC and a new Prometheus metrics exporter.
Cockpit. The Cockpit web console has been upgraded to version 356. Among the changes are warnings for incorrect shutdowns, support for custom branding via /etc/cockpit/branding.css, separate VNC console windows, lifecycle management for quadlet in cockpit-podman, and a file manager that allows the creation of empty files.
There is also an important hardware limitation inherited from the Rocky Linux 10 branch: for x86_64, the baseline level is now x86-64-v3, and processors at the x86-64-v2 level and older are not supported. This should be checked separately before upgrading old servers.
Rocky Linux 10.2 represents a significant advancement towards post-quantum cryptography, an updated toolchain, and a more modern container infrastructure. For existing systems, upgrading to Rocky Linux 10 is standard, while for users on branches 8 and 9, transitioning to 10.x remains a complete migration rather than a simple package update.
Source: linux.org.ru
