CentOS Replacement: Rocky Linux 9.0 Released

Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, when Red Hat announced that they would stop developing CentOS, in response to CentOS original founder Gregory Kurtzer announcing that he would start a project to achieve the original goals of CentOS. 

Its name is a tribute to Rocky McGaugh, the early co-founder of CentOS.

Rocky Linux 9.0, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, was officially released today, and notable updates include:

Activities now provide a better experience for working, launching applications, and more.

Other notable improvements for desktop use include:

• Software can be run on a discrete graphics card by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate option
• Ability to mute notifications by selecting “Do Not Disturb”, which will appear as a separate button in notifications
• Each screen can use a different refresh rate
• The Activities program allows you to group application icons into folders using drag and drop
• Decimal point display scale

File system

XFS now supports Direct Access (DAX) operations, allowing direct access to byte-addressable persistent memory, helping to avoid the delays caused by using traditional block I/O. 

NFS introduces the “eager write” mount option to help reduce latency.

Language runtimes and tools

Rocky Linux 9 has many of the latest runtimes and compilers, including GCC 11.2.1, LLVM (13.0.1), Rust (1.58.1), and Go (1.17.1).

Rocky Linux 9 has updated developer toolchain versions, including GCC (11.2.1), glibc (2.34), and binutils (2.35). 

New features of the GCC compiler help developers better trace code with improved debugging options and write optimized code for efficient use of hardware.

Rocky Linux 9 extends the module packaging capabilities found in Rocky Linux 8. 

Software Collections, Flatpaks, and RPMs are all now included in the application stream, making it easier for developers to use their favorite packages.

• Python 3.9 will be supported throughout the life of Rocky Linux 9 with many new features including new string prefix and suffix methods, dictionary union operations, high performance parser, multiprocessing improvements.
• Node.js 16 includes an upgrade of the V8 engine to version 9.2, new Timer Promises API, new Web streams API, and support for npm package manager version 7.20.3. Node.js is now compatible with OpenSSL 3.0.
• Ruby 3.0.3 provides several performance improvements, as well as bug and security fixes. Significant improvements include concurrency, static analysis, pattern matching with case/in expressions, redesigned single-line pattern matching, and find pattern matching.
• Perl 5.32 provides bug fixes and improvements, including Unicode version 13, a new experimental infix operator, and faster feature checking.
• PHP 8.0 provides bug fixes and enhancements, including the use of structured metadata syntax, newly named parameters, and improved just-in-time compilation performance.

Safety

By default, root password authentication via SSH is disabled. 

The default configuration of OpenSSH does not allow the root user to log in with a password, preventing attackers from gaining access through brute force password attacks. 

Instead of using the root password, users can log in to remote systems using SSH keys.

OpenSSL 3.0 adds the concept of a Provider, a new version management scheme, and improved HTTPS. 

OpenSSL 3.0’s new FIPS module prevents the use of non-FIPS algorithms, and FIPS flags can be set in the kernel without switching OpenSSL to FIPS mode.

System monitoring

The Cockpit web console has an improved performance metrics page that helps identify the cause of high CPU, memory, disk, and network resource usage.

Download

Users can download Rocky Linux 9.0 for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x architectures on the download page .

Support

• Rocky Linux 9 will be supported until May 31, 2032
• Rocky Linux 8 will continue to be supported until May 31, 2029

More details can be found here: https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-0-ga-release/