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The developers of the Rocky Linux distribution, an alternative to CentOS Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, released today the final release of Rocky Linux 8.4.
Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 and dubbed “Green Obsidian,” Rocky Linux 8.4 is here as the first stable release and introduces new upstream modules, such as MariaDB 10.5, OpenSCA 1.3.4, PostgreSQL 13, Python 3.9, Redis 6, scap-security-guide 0.1.54, Subversion 1.14, and SWIG 4.0, as well as an updated toolchain consisting of GCC 10, LLVM 11.0.0, Rust 1.49, and Go 1.15.7.
There are also major changes around security, networking, identity management, clustering, kernel, etc. Among these, there’s support for TCP encapsulation and security labels for the IKEv2 protocol for the IPsec VPN provided by Libreswan, integrity checking support for the fapolicyd framework, and full support for the nmstate network API for hosts.
This release also adds support for the MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) in-kernel data-forwarding mechanism used for routing traffic flow across enterprise networks. On top of that, Rocky Linux 8.4 introduces three new traffic control actions for the iproute2 utility, including mac_push, pop_eth, and push_eth for adding MPLS labels.
Other interesting changes include support for Ansible modules that can be used for automated management of role-based access control (RBAC) in Identity Management (IdM), a persistent Pacemaker resource agent for maintaining the state data, speeding up cluster response time for services with a high state overhead, detecting failures asynchronously and injecting them into Pacemaker.
Under the hood, Rocky Linux’s kernel was patched to support the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) kernel module for 8th and 9th generation Intel Core processors, proactive compaction, a new implementation of the slab memory controller for the control groups, and the time namespace feature.
“This feature is suited for changing the date and time inside Linux containers. The in-container clock adjustments after restoration from a checkpoint are also now possible,” reads the release notes.
You can download Rocky Linux 8.4 right now from the official website. This first stable release is supported on 64-bit (x86_64) and AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) architectures, and it’s available as Minimal, Boot, or Full editions. Please note that it’s not possible to upgrade from the Release Candidates of Rocky Linux 8.3 or Rocky Linux 8.4.
Image credits: Rocky Linux (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 3 years ago
