Rocky Linux is a distribution based on RHEL and released as a replacement for CentOS.
The release of the new version of Rocky Linux 8.7 was announced, This being the third stable version of the project, recognized as ready for production deployments.
The distribution is fully binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 and includes all improvements proposed in this release and just like classic CentOS, the changes made to Rocky Linux packages boil down to the removal of the Red Hat branding and the removal of RHEL-specific packages, such as redhat-* , insights-client and subscribe-manager-migration*.
Rocky Linux is aiming to create a free RHEL build that can replace classic CentOS, after Red Hat dropped support for the CentOS 8 branch ahead of schedule at the end of 2021 and not in 2029 as originally intended.
The project has been placed under the auspices of the newly formed Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), which is registered as a non-profit Public Benefit Corporation. The organization is owned by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of CentOS, but management functions in accordance with the adopted charter are delegated to the board of directors, in which the participants involved in the work of the project are elected by the community.
Main new features of Rocky Linux 8.7
In this release version of Rocky Linux 8.7, release-specific changes are mentioned to include the delivery to a separate plus repository de a package with the mail client Thunderbird with PGP support and the open-vm-tools package, plus the nfv repository offers a set of packages for the virtualization of network components, developed by the SIG NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) group.
Another novelty that stands out in this new version of Rocky Linux 8.7 is that now the images rocky linux official are available on Oracle Cloud Platform, plus the artifacts behind all created images are now exported for use in development.
In addition to this, we can also find that the availability of cloud images with their variants LVM from the generic, EC2, and Azure images that are already available.
New versions of module sequences include node.js 18, mercurial:6.2, maven:3.8 and ruby:3.1, as well as newer versions of the compiler toolset include GCC Toolset 12, LLVM Toolset 14.0.6, Rust Toolset 1.62 and Go Toolset 1.18, Redis 6.2.7 and Valgrind 3.19
The updates and conversions of the system packages are also highlighted, among which the following packages stand out: chrony 4.2, unbound 1.16.2, opencryptoki 3.18.0, powerpc-utils 1.3.10, libva 2.13.0, PCP 5.3.7, Grafana 7.5.13, SystemTap 4.7, NetworkManager 1.40, samba 4.16.1.
Of them there is an important package and it is the new version of the redesigned NetworkManager 1.40, version that endows the system with support for managing endpoints for MPTCP, plus there is a new profile setting ipv4.link-local to enable IPv4 link-local addresses, with this now, link-local can be configured in addition to manual or auto/DHCP addresses.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The default value of the LimitRequestBody directive in httpd was changed from unlimited to 1GiB to fix CVE-2022-29404.
- SSSD now supports direct integration with Windows Server 2022.
- Current Rocky Linux 8 users can upgrade to 8.7 a dnf update via PackageKit and its interfaces (GNOME software, etc.).
Finally, for those interested in knowing more about it about this new release, you can consult the details in the following link.
Download and Get Rocky Linux 8.7
For those who are interested in being able to test or install this new version on their computerPlease note that Rocky Linux builds are prepared for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
Additionally, assemblies for Oracle Cloud Platform (OCP), GenericCloud, Amazon AWS (EC2), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud environments are generated, as well as images for containers and virtual machines in RootFS/OCI and Vagrant (Libvirt, VirtualBox) formats. , VMware).
Users of other Enterprise Linux 8 distributions can upgrade and convert to Rocky Linux 8.7 via the migrate2rocky conversion script.