Goodbye CentOS, AlmaLinux 9 Beta Released

On April 19th, ET, the AlmaLinux team announced their 9.0 beta milestone. The team said that AlmaLinux 9.0 Beta is currently available for all supported architectures, including x86_64, AArch64, PPC64LE, and s390x.

Over the past year, AlmaLinux has proven itself capable of becoming a popular, community-based alternative to RHEL, growing after Red Hat announced it would discontinue the zero-cost downstream version of CentOS Linux, originally developed by CloudLinux Created to provide a community-supported production-grade enterprise operating system. The first stable version of AlmaLinux was released on March 30, 2021.

Biggest Upgrade: Linux Kernel 5.14

AlmaLinux 9 Beta tracks the changes found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and has switched to using the Linux 5.14 kernel and many package updates on RHEL8 / AlmaLinux 8. The specific updates are as follows:

• The packages and repositories for AlmaLinux 9 are signed with the new RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux-9.

• Linux Kernel 5.14

• Updated dynamic programming language, web and database servers:

• Perl 5.32

• PHP 8.0

• Python 3.9

• Git 2.31

• Apache HTTP Server 2.4

• Varnish Cache 6.5

• Squid 5.2

• MySQL 8.0

• Redis 6.2

• Updated components:

• GCC 11.2

• glibc 2.34

• binutils 2.35

• Compiler update:

• Go Toolset 1.17.7

• Updates to performance tools and debuggers:

• GDB 10.2

• Valgrind 3.18.1

• SystemTap 4.6

• Dyninst 11.0.0

• elfutils 0.186

• Java tool update:

• Maven 3.6

• Ant 1.10

For more details, see the beta release notes :

https://wiki.almalinux.org/release-notes/9.0-beta.html

AlmaLinux 9.0 Beta can be downloaded from mirrors.almalinux.org .

Why is Red Hat discontinuing the CentOS project?

In 2020, Red Hat announced that it will end service support for CentOS 8 and CentOS on December 31, 2021 and June 30, 2024, respectively, focusing the work and investment of the CentOS project on CentOS Stream. As soon as this matter came out, the industry set off a heated discussion: Why did Red Hat retire the CentOS project? Recently, Red Hat responded to a number of questions.

Cao Hengkang, Global Vice President of Red Hat and President of Greater China, said that in the past, many customers and developers added a lot of functions based on CentOS and would not give back to the upstream community, so they became a branch. Over time, these branches became unmaintained and became Since the “orphans” in the community have been eliminated, Red Hat hopes to change this status quo, restore the concept of upstream priority in the community, put CentOS Stream in front of RHEL, and ecological partners can record innovations in CentOS Stream.

In addition, in response to the “stop service” that everyone is talking about, Zhang Jiaju, chief architect of Red Hat China, also explained that the transition from CentOS to CentOS Stream can be understood as an upgrade, and the original CentOS users only need a few commands to easily Migrating to CentOS Stream, CentOS Stream has all the previous security updates of CentOS. In this sense, it has not stopped.

Alternatives to CentOS

Of course, as a user, in the face of the suspension of CentOS, of course, the choice is not just CentOS Stream. In addition to AlmaLinux, CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer and the community hope that open source can continue to benefit the society, and also launched the Rocky Linux project.

Relatively speaking, Rocky Linux release time is late. Kurtzer said that in addition to building from scratch and guaranteeing all-round performance, he has been trying to keep the project in the hands of the community and avoid the same fate of CentOS. To that end, Kurtzer created the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) with a “community charter.”

Within three days of its launch, Rocky Linux attracted 80,000 downloads. At the same time, Google’s cloud service, Google Compute Engine (GCE), has added support for Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, and Google has also become a sponsor (Principal Sponsor) of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF). Additionally, Microsoft’s “signing up as a RESF partner” will also ensure Rocky Linux availability on Azure.

On December 10, 2021, Rocky Linux announced in the December community update that it has started work on Rocky Linux 9, starting from the RHEL beta source.

Reference link:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AlmaLinux-9-Beta

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/20/almalinux_9_beta/

The text and pictures in this article are from InfoQ