Rocky Linux is a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is a privately owned

benefit corporation In the United States, a benefit corporation (or in several jurisdictions including Delaware, a public-benefit corporation or PBC) is a type of for-profit corporate entity, authorized by 35 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, that includ ...

that describes itself as a "self imposed not-for-profit". It is intended to be a

downstream Downstream may refer to: * Downstream (bioprocess) * Downstream (manufacturing) * Downstream (networking) * Downstream (software development) * Downstream (petroleum industry) * Upstream and downstream (DNA), determining relative positions on DNA ...

, complete binary-compatible release using the

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

(RHEL) operating system source code. The project's aim is to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system. Rocky Linux, along with

and

SUSE Linux Enterprise SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop comp ...

, has become popular for enterprise operating system use. The first

release candidate A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

version of Rocky Linux was released on April 30, 2021, and its first

general availability A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

version was released on June 21, 2021. Rocky Linux 8 will be supported through May 2029.

History

On December 8, 2020,

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

announced that they would discontinue development of

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

, which had been a production-ready downstream version of

, in favor of a newer upstream development variant of that operating system known as "CentOS Stream". In response, Gregory Kurtzer, one of the original founders of CentOS, announced that he would start a new project to achieve the original goals of CentOS. Its name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh. By December 12, the

code repository In version control systems, a repository is a data structure that stores metadata for a set of files or directory structure. Depending on whether the version control system in use is distributed, like Git or Mercurial, or centralized, like Subver ...

of Rocky Linux had become the top-trending repository on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

. On December 22, 2020, Rocky Linux community manager Jordan Pisaniello announced that the target for an initial release was anywhere between March and May of 2021. On January 20, 2021, it was announced that a test repository would be made available to the public by the end of February, and a release candidate was on target for the end of March 2021. However, that date was slightly pushed back, and on April 30, 2021, the first release candidate was officially released. The second release candidate, of version 8.4, the last before the stable release, was released on June 4, 2021. The high version number is based on the designation of RHEL. Rocky Linux is a clone of RHEL, which is also binary-compatible and is already supported by numerous large, financially strong sponsors. On June 21, 2021, the stable release of Rocky Linux 8.4 was released, with the code name "Green Obsidian". Rocky Linux 9.0 was released on July 14, 2022, alongside a new

reproducible Reproducibility, also known as replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a ...

build system called "Peridot", created to ensure the community can easily create new RHEL forks if Rocky Linux ever were to be discontinued, and to allow the Rocky Linux project to make new releases faster. Rocky Linux 9.0 is also the first version to support

little-endian In computing, endianness, also known as byte sex, is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most si ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

processors and

IBM Z IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z/Architecture mainframe computers. In July 2017, with another generation of products, the official family was changed to IBM Z from IBM z Systems; the IBM Z family now includes the newest mod ...

(s390x) mainframes.

Releases

Some of the ISO images released by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation have no direct upstream equivalents. They are created for specific purposes, such as for providing a live bootable image, or for providing a reduced-size installation medium. * Rocky Linux was announced , first beta release was 143 days later.

References

External links

* * {{Authority control Enterprise Linux distributions Linux distributions RPM-based Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions

History

Releases

See also

References

External links