Project AlmaLinux presented an update to the Kitten 10 distribution, based on the package base CentOS Stream 10, which will be used as the basis for the future release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Kitten 10 is presented as a test distribution that allows you to get acquainted with the capabilities being developed for RHEL 10 and complements CentOS Stream with its own modifications. The distribution's installation builds are created for the x86_64, x86_64_v2, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures.
The Kitten repository uses a continuous package update model. Installation builds are updated every three months. Kitten repositories are used as an upstream branch. AlmaLinux 10 - Fixes and new features are first tested in the Kitten repositories and then migrated to AlmaLinuxKitten repositories are also used as a platform for integration and collaboration with upstream projects such as CentOS Stream and Fedora. The new build marks the transition to the kernel Linux 6.12 and adding packages with Qt 6.8, allowing to use KDE from the EPEL repository.
The main differences between Kitten and CentOS Stream:
- The use of the %rbp processor register as a base pointer to the stack frame containing return addresses and function variables (frame pointer) has been returned. Using a pointer to stack frames allows the distribution to use additional capabilities for tracing and profiling the system.
- Separate builds for the second version of the x86-64 microarchitecture (x86-64-v2) have been created, which are maintained in parallel with the base x86-64 builds, which are created with optimizations for the x86-64-v3 microarchitecture used in RHEL 10. Additional support for x86-64-v2 ensures compatibility with CPUs older than Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator, designed before 2013.
- Implemented the ability to boot in UEFI Secure Boot mode for systems with Intel/AMD and ARM processors.
- We've continued to ship server and client implementations of the SPICE protocol, which enables remote desktop interactions running in a virtual environment under QEMU/KVM. Unlike the VNC and RDP protocols, SPICE renders screen contents and processes audio streams on the client side, rather than on the server. serverIn RHEL, SPICE support was dropped in release 9.0.
- The ability to use a hypervisor has been implemented KVM On systems with IBM POWER processors. In RHEL, such support was discontinued in the 9.0 branch.
- Renewed support for over 150 hardware devices not supported in RHEL 10.
- The repositories include RPM packages for Firefox and Thunderbird (in CentOS Stream 10 and RHEL10 are recommended to install Firefox and Thunderbird from flatpak packages.
Source: opennet.ru
