Rocky Linux 9.4: New Features Aligned with RHEL, But on SUSE's KIWI

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Rocky Linux 9.4 has been released as the latest version of the distribution derived from technologies developed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Like AlmaLinux, many features were announced with the release of RHEL 9.4, which is expected as one of its goals is to maintain maximum compatibility.

Since it aims to stay as close as possible to RHEL 9.4, Rocky Linux 9.4 includes many of the new features found in the commercial distribution, such as SELinux user space 3.6, which has introduced deny rules to enhance the customization of security module policies.

Continuing with security-related improvements, version 1.4.0 of the Linux kernel cryptography API (libkcapi) has added new options and tools, specifically the -T option that allows specifying destination file names in hash sum calculations. Version 5.71 of the TLS/SSL tunneling service stunnel changes OpenSSL 1.1 behavior, and Keylime's verifier and registrar are now available as containers.

Rocky Linux 9.4 provides Python 3.12, Ruby 3.3, PHP 8.2, nginx 1.24, MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 16, Git 2.43.0, and Git LFS 3.4.1 for server and programming technologies, while GCC 13, LLVM 17.0, Rust 1.75.0, and Go 1.21.0 are available as compilers. SystemTap 5.0 and elfutil 0.190 have been updated as performance and debugging tools, while PCP 6.2.0 is now available as a performance monitoring tool. Key system components include Linux 5.14, systemd 252, and DNF 4.14.

The image creator allows arbitrary custom mount points except for specific paths reserved for the operating system. Different partition modes, such as auto-lvm, lvm, and raw, can be created. Users can now customize a profile's settings and add them to blueprint customizations using selected and unselected options to add or remove rules.

Interestingly, most Rocky Linux 9.4 images, including Cloud, Container, and Vagrant, have been created using a SUSE and openSUSE tool called KIWI, while the Vagrant-VBox, Vagrant-VMware, and OCP-Base (Oracle Cloud Platform) images are still generated with imagefactory. Additionally, the Rocky Linux publisher account for Microsoft Azure has changed to resf, marking older images as obsolete.

All details about Rocky Linux 9.4 can be found in the official announcement and release notes. Systems are available in the distribution's download section in images supporting x86_64 (AMD and Intel), 64-bit ARM (aarch64), PowerPC Little-Endian (ppc64le), and IBM Z (s390) architectures. Notably, there are desktop-oriented images for x86_64 and 64-bit ARM, and a Raspberry Pi system build for 64-bit ARM.

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