PALO ALTO, Calif., May 27, 2022 — AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the community owned and governed open source CentOS replacement AlmaLinux, has announced AlmaLinux 9 is now available for immediate download. The newest version of the popular CentOS alternative features functionality to make it easier to automate and deploy at scale, networking enhancements for cloud and edge and is more secure and faster by design via higher grade encryption and SELinux speed improvements. Based on Kernel 5.14, AlmaLinux 9 is the first release of AlmaLinux that stems from CentOS Stream through RHEL. AlmaLinux are proud contributors to CentOS Stream.

AlmaLinux 9, available quickly after RHEL 9, has reached architecture parity with upstream, becoming the first distribution to do so, and is available for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x. AlmaLinux 9 images, live media and container images can be downloaded here: https://mirrors.almalinux.org.

“We are building AlmaLinux with the specific goal of creating an independent CentOS successor that is truly community-centric and designed for everyone, whether you’re deploying hybrid multi-cloud solutions, large HPC or VFX clusters, a small business, a homelab, or even for your Raspberry Pi. We offer everyone a uniform platform which is safe, secure, easy to use, and dependable, to build your tomorrow on. We are pleased to announce AlmaLinux 9, and proud of the progress we have made over the past year, working with upstream and the Stream process, releasing in lockstep with RHEL, adding new architectures, containers, while also helping users every day and growing the AlmaLinux community,” said Jack Aboutboul, Community Manager for AlmaLinux and a member of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board. “This is how real open source grows and flourishes.”

AlmaLinux 9 Main Features

Automation & web cockpit improvements

• More performance metrics in web cockpit
• Access to information to identify bottlenecks
• Easier data export to data analytics and reporting tools, such as Grafana
• Ability to apply kernel live patching inside web cockpit
• Ability to build images via a single build node

Security improvements

• Ability to use Smart Card authentication to access remote hosts
• Additional security profiles to help achieve compliance with standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA
• More logging details from SSSD, the open source client for enterprise identity management, such as time to complete tasks and errors, and a new log parsing tool for SSSD debug log analysis, acts as “a grep front-end” for new search capabilities
• AlmaLinux 9 integrates OpenSSL 3:
  • Allow for use of the latest security standards and security ciphers for encrypting and protecting data
  • New FIPS module has been submitted for FIPS 140-2 validation, the federal security requirement for cryptographic modules
• Benefits from digital hashes and signatures that are provided by the kernel integrity subsystem, Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) for verifying the OS
• SSH root password login is disabled by default

Application Development Environment updates

• GCC 11 is the default system compiler
• Latest versions of LLVM, Rust and Go compilers
• Version 2.34 of the GNU C Library project (glibc)
• Python 3.9, which includes proper timezone support, a new high-performant parser, new string functions, dictionary update and merge operators
  • Including timezone-aware timestamps and new string prefix and suffix methods, and dictionary union operations
• AlmaLinux 9 UBI base images
  • Standard, micro, minimal, and init images
  • Updated Podman container engine
  • Cgroup2 by default, supported by Podman, which adds rootless containers and better memory management and is now more frequently required for Kubernetes tooling

AlmaLinux has millions of downloads from a network of over 200 mirrors worldwide and powers projects by US government agencies, the defense sector, CERN particle accelerators, business applications across a wide range of enterprises as well software development at gitlab and the web hosting industry. AlmaLinux has over 1.5 million docker pulls, availability on all major public cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle OCI and others. The AlmaLinux OS Foundation members supporting the rapid development of AlmaLinux include AMD, CloudFest, CloudLinux and Codenotary. AlmaLinux is adopted and supported by some of today’s foremost open source ecosystem projects including VMWare, GitLab, Tenable and more. For more information see: https://almalinux.org.

About AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-governed and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution. It is focused on long-term stability and delivering a robust production-grade platform. It is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL(r) and pre-Steam CentOS. The AlmaLinux OS falls under the purview of The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, which is a 501(c)(6) non-profit created for the benefit of the AlmaLinux OS community. Visit https://almalinux.org.

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Source: AlmaLinux