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RHEL clone Rocky Linux 9.3 has been released today and it’s now available for download as a free alternative to Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distributions CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Rocky Linux 9.3 is here six months after Rocky Linux 9.2 and brings back both the Cloud and Container images for the PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le) architecture, which were missing from Rockly Linux 9.2 due to issues with QEMU. However, the devs say that these images may be missing some features compared to the images available for other supported architectures.
This release also introduces a new kernel-uki package to provide users with a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) variant for booting Rocky Linux. This feature is considered experimental in this release and the UKI image is signed with its own SecureBoot key.
Other than that, Rocky Linux 9.3 merges the kernel-rt package into a subpackage of the kernel package and introduces a new version of Java through the java-21-openjdk package. It also updates the AMI image for AWS EC2 AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures to support UEFI boot in addition to the Legacy BIOS boot.
Security-wise, Rocky Linux 9.3 improves support for the Extended Master Secret (EMS) extension (RFC 7627) required by the FIPS-140-3 standard for all TLS 1.2 connections, further migrates OpenSSH away from the less secure SHA-1 message digest, and updates the SCAP Security Guide to version 0.1.69.
Updated components in this release include GCC 11.4.1 and GCC 13, LLVM 16.0.6, Rust 1.71.1, Go 1.20.6, Keylime 7.3.0, Node.js 20, Redis 7, Apache 2.4.57, Grafana 9.2.10, PCP 6.0.5, Valgrind 3.21, SystemTap 4.9, elfutils 0.189, OpenSCAP 1.3.8, SEtools 4.4.3, Keylime 7.3.0, and pcsc-lite-ccid 1.5.2.
For more details, check out the release notes.
Rocky Linux 9.3 is available for download right now from the official website for x86_64 (64-bit), AArch64 (ARM64), PPC64le (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian), and s390x (IBM System z) architectures. Live images with the GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and MATE desktops are available for download as well, along with Cloud and Container images.
Image credits: Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 5 months ago
