DEV Community: AlmaLinux

Top 5 Reasons Why AlmaLinux Supports Mainframes

Jack Aboutboul — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 17:00:15 +0000

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation has announced support for AlmaLinux on the IBM z (s390x) platform. Aside from ticking all the boxes and locking in parity with RHEL, why has the project made such a commitment in an era of managed services and cloud-native platforms?

There is a misconception that mainframes are relics of the past. Frequently, they are portrayed as monstrous systems, bristling with dusty old hardware residing in cabinets reminiscent of the black monolith from Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The reality isn’t as nostalgic—or as dusty.

Modern mainframes, mainly from IBM, which dominates the market, run applications that we use every day. The most well-known use-case is the millions of ATM withdrawals and credit card transactions the world makes each day but includes other financial transactions, customer order processing, production and inventory control, and payroll.

The Rise of Linux
Without the large groundswell of support for Linux on IBM Z (as it came to be called) and IBM’s early hardware support for Linux, it’s unlikely AlmaLinux would be in a position to announce a new Linux distribution for mainframes. It’s also the level of Linux adoption among the majority of large mainframe enterprises that makes Almalinux’s support a good decision.

The history of Linux within the mainframe world is longer than you might expect. After an initial proof of concept, mainframes officially started supporting Linux on IBM Z in 2000. IBM went on to develop the IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux) processor, which runs Linux workloads exclusively. This allows Linux workloads to run on the same systems as traditional mainframe operating systems without affecting the cost of those workloads.

While other vendors launched commercial Linux distributions and support packages, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise (and, more recently, Ubuntu), the mainframe lacked an open source community edition. Unlike many Linux distributions, the mainframe community did not have a downloadable open source Linux operating system they could experiment with and build appliances on without any ties to a commercial offering.

One strong contributor and advocate for Linux and open source on the mainframe, Sine Nomine Associates, an IT research and custom development engineering firm, observed this gap and approached the Community ENTerprise Linux Operating System (CentOS) project. CentOS developed and supported a functionally compatible Linux distribution based on upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS had struggled to support mainframes itself because of the significant hardware investment required, so Sine Nomine forked and compiled its own distribution called ClefOS. Other Linux distributions became active in the IBM Z space, such as Debian, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.

Because of the mainframe's core design values of compatibility, reliability, availability, scalability, and security, it isn’t simply legacy tech that’s reluctantly supported by enterprises. Mainframes are a crucial part of many digital transformations and modernization programs. This means that Linux on the mainframe, either supported by commercial contracts or running community editions like AlmaLinux, often sits at the core of IT organizations. Outside of banking, industries such as finance, health care, insurance, retail, hospitality, utilities, government, and essentially any industry hosting mission-critical applications have this demand. They demand zero downtime, and are running at close to peak utilization 24/7, while handling high throughput volumes.

AlmaLinux came to the attention of Sine Nomine when Red Hat announced the end of support for CentOS 8 and the move to CentOS Stream. The firm has been instrumental in bringing other open source software, such as PostgreSQL, to the platform and wanted to continue supporting a community edition. They needed to find a CentOS alternative with 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL and AlmaLinux was the perfect fit. The project and the AlmaLinux OS Foundation matched Sine Nomine’s open source philosophy, and AlmaLinux has gone on to partner with Sine Nomine to provide resources, share knowledge and ensure users have the support they might need.

To understand why mainframes remain relevant, it’s important to comprehend their architecture. Mainframes are packed with processors (up to 190 independently configurable cores on an IBM z15 system), up to 40TB of Redundant Array of Independent Memory (RAIM) along with plenty of I/O adapters in a single box. They are designed to be as reliable as possible while handling high volumes of input and output (I/O). Their architecture maximizes throughput predominantly for high volumes of transaction processing and batch workloads in a very secure fashion.

To optimize performance, a mainframe is equipped with specialty cards for network, storage, compression, and cryptography. Each card has its own processor and memory.

Each mainframe central processing unit (CPU) or core can also be defined as an IBM z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), designed to offload Java and database work, along with Linux workloads when running within z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) .

Additionally, mainframes cores include System Assist Processors (SAPs), effectively highly efficient traffic controllers, and health checkers, ensuring high availability. SAPs speed up data transfers between the operating system and I/O. If an SAP sees a failure, including a CPU failure, it will dynamically swap over to one of the spare CPUs automatically and call home ,allowing IBM to work with the customer to make sure there is not a greater problem that needs to be addressed.

The primary benefits of this hardware approach are that a mainframe can tackle complex workloads entirely in memory, rather than spread across multiple x86 servers, and run at 100% capacity without depreciation. Above 100%, a mainframe may slow down, but it won’t freeze if it encounters a very IO-bound workload, such as database work, which would likely happen with x86 architecture. Part of the reason for this is that the central processor unit offloads IO work to processors available in a subsystem.

The CPUs only run cycles associated with your application that require computing power. In contrast, Kurt Acker, Principal IT Architect at Sine Nomine Associates says: “You can’t control what each chip does on a UNIX or x86 box. A chip will perform work assigned to it by the OS, and, although hypervisors enable you to carve up those resources, it isn’t to the same extent as mainframes.”

IBM’s z/15 introduced encryption everywhere by moving support for this functionality onto its chips. During the entire processing of a workload, the transaction and all data can automatically be fully encrypted.

For a platform that’s frequently labeled a ‘dinosaur,’ mainframes have not only avoided a mass extinction event but continued to live on and thrive—IBM reported that, in Q4 2020, 67 of the Fortune 100 continue to use the mainframe.

Most notably in banking, mainframe adoption rests at a staggering 90% among the top 50 banks, which benefit from its reliability and built-in redundancies. IBM also says that four of the top five airlines rely on mainframes for ticketing and their ability to handle high volume transactions in real-time with its transaction processing facility (zTPF) operating system.

Since the introduction of IBM’s System/360 in 1964, each new ‘Big Iron’ platform has advanced the mainframe’s technological capabilities. The new IBM mainframe that arrived in the first half of 2022 reflects this roadmap with the Telum processor inside it, which packs in 22.5 billion transistors. The Telum chip will not only enable organizations to run more transaction processing and batch processing workloads, reducing the unit cost of infrastructure and lowering cost per transaction, but it will also add scalable AI inference performance at very low latency to the mainframe’s capabilities.

Mainframes: playing to their strengths
When assessing what platform to use, including cloud or mainframe, each platform needs to be viewed objectively and each has unique strengths and factored into why AlmaLinux OS is now supported.

Linux is Linux: One positive for AlmaLinux supporting Linux on mainframes is that it’s another opportunity to help extend Linux’s reach and solidify its position. It also means organizations can leverage that dominance—it is much easier to onboard a new mainframe operator when they can use familiar Linux commands. The key difference is understanding what resources are behind a system when it is run on shared architecture, but this is true for any hypervisor environment. While a new mainframe operator from a Linux background learns to adjust to the performance differences, they can still ssh in and experience an x86 environment.

Strong security: As they are designed with built-in mechanisms for zero trust, users can extend secure services running on a Linux mainframe so they benefit the cloud. For example, workloads that you can’t and wouldn’t want to run on a mainframe, such as office productivity services, can have their security controls managed and pushed out from a centralized mainframe.

Linux co-located with data works: Linux on the mainframe makes a lot of sense for specific use cases because it enables co-location with the data. A user can have their chosen database on a mainframe and have frontend services communicating with it. Underneath the covers, a mainframe uses its internal circuitry to pass those messages back and forth swiftly. For example, a mainframe’s OSA card, the equivalent of a network card but with a much larger cache, can control inbound data flow to the CPU and (as part of that IO subsystem) allow the system to work efficiently. Essentially, once a trusted message comes into your system, you can completely process everything that's within your control before you send it back out.

For example, when tasked with developing a reservation system, Sine Nomine used MongoDB for front-ending the system. The firm tested the service on both an x86 cloud setup and mainframe: “the x86 cloud setup achieved 3,000 responses per second, but the machine died with 100% loss of information as it couldn't process it, overloaded as it was IO-bound and died,” says Kurt Acker. In contrast, Acker says, “we achieved almost 9,000 responses per second, on a 1GB OSA card. And it didn't die. It just slowed down.”

What this demonstrates is not the poor performance of x86 systems, but the limitations of different systems, their architecture, and how they operate.

Total costs and consolidation
Mainframes are often seen as expensive, and they can be, but it’s a question of scale and considering the math. Going back to the MongoDB example, users are charged not by the CPU but memory used. The x86 cloud setup required data sharding and at least three additional nodes to handle the volume of data being processed. This setup also requires at least two or three backup servers to ensure high availability. On a mainframe, only one live node is required. No data sharding was required as the system was able to process everything with a single server and two backup servers for high availability. Essentially, at least three times the amount of memory is needed to process the same amount of data reliability in an x86 environment, and that only accounts for production.

Of course, the math doesn't always turn in a mainframe’s favor; if you are running less than 100 servers it would make more sense to run them in the cloud. However, once you reach hundreds or thousands of servers, consolidation becomes a key concern. Generally, a mainframe will run with 50% lower electricity costs than cloud, and around 75% less floor space for workloads at scale. Where a zero carbon footprint is a goal for many enterprises now, continued server sprawl isn’t sustainable.

Core consolidation is often overlooked as well. For instance, software that charges by the CPU, you may be able to run 20:1 comparisons of CPU consolidation when compared to x86 systems.

Good code can run anywhere: There’s a misconception that mainframes need extensive rewriting work, but there is interchangeability between z architecture and open systems. The caveat is that code must adhere to coding standards. As long as code is not developed with platform-specific items then code is extremely portable and has the potential to be recompiled and moved anywhere.

When trying to modernize legacy applications, such as COBOL programs, you may want to build a new frontend that is cloud compatible. However, building it on the mainframe platform, thereby allowing the app to be closer to the data, makes sense; it’s in your control, it’s secure, and you can understand the environment and how well it works. If you use this approach, you can decide to move an app to the cloud later as long as you are careful about frontend services and database access you develop. Don’t let the speed of light interfere with your performance expectations.

While some sections of the tech industry would have you believe that mainframes have been relegated to a conversation piece when Netflix decides to option films like Sneakers, there are many credible reasons to use mainframe architecture and support Linux on mainframe. As Kurt says, it is a question of your list of requirements: “Do you need high availability and security, do you understanding the workloads that you have, and where they can and should run?” If you need high availability for an application running on x86, you need huge amounts of clustering, but you may find you can achieve high availability from the hardware itself so it becomes a question of selecting the right architecture for your workloads. “In the case of mainframes, workloads that consolidate well are one example. Java workloads themselves can benefit from pause-less garbage collection, which works in real-time with your system,” says Acker.

Ultimately, why we at AlmaLinux have invested in supporting the architecture boils down to a goal set out for the project from the outset. AlmaLinux wanted to make an open source Linux distribution that is accessible to as many people as possible, and that benefits many different communities. This has led the project to establish initiatives, such as providing live media for individual users, making HPC more accessible to the science community, and, in partnership with Sine Nomine Associates, enabling operators to run Linux on their mainframes.
/ends/

How We Built AlmaLinux 8.6 for s390x

Jack Aboutboul — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 22:34:25 +0000

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced support for the IBM z (s390x) platform thanks to a collaboration with Gold Partner, Sine Nomine Associates (SNA).

The Almalinux OS Foundation continues a long history of Linux and open source software support on mainframes, which was kickstarted at the end of the last century. In this blog, we wanted to highlight some of SNA’s involvement as we open a new chapter for Linux on the mainframe.

Back in 2000, SNA was winning awards at key industry conferences for evangelizing Linux on the IBM mainframe environment, since then it has continued supporting Linux and open source software. The engineering firm has worked tirelessly to bring open source to the platform and recently worked with IBM and Microsoft to bring .NET 6 to IBM z https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/elizabeth-k-joseph1/2021/11/10/net-6-comes-to-ibm-z-and-linuxone.

SNA also created its first Linux distribution for mainframes in 2012. Their distribution was based on CentOS 6.2 and, for trademark reasons, called ClefOS. In the early days, the hardware investment was significant. They had to use a server farm of PCs running a mainframe emulator called Hercules, on which Linux ran to build ClefOS. “It worked,” says Neale Ferguson, Chief Scientist at SNA, “but it was slow and took six weeks to create a new distribution when a new CentOS release came out.”

The process was reduced by several orders of magnitude because of IBM z resources made available as part of the Linux Community system based at Marist College, which provides ongoing support. In fact, as Linux on mainframe sees a new chapter with AlmaLinux, SNA would like to express its gratitude to the Open Mainframe project and the resources that the Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, has generously provided to projects for many decades.

Since SNA wasn’t in a position to bootstrap a distribution itself when it came time to find an alternative to CentOS. AlmaLinux “was the most aligned with the open source philosophy,” says Ferguson, and the approach has been a collaborative effort from the start, sharing knowledge and resources.

But what’s involved in bootstrapping the AlmaLinux distribution for a completely different architecture? Ferguson says it involves building a “starter kit” for your first chroot test environment. The process involves digging out appropriate packages (RPMs) in the x86_64 distribution that need to be added, excluding those that aren’t, such as those relating to BIOS and other firmware, and modifying others that would be useful for z. Fortunately, the number of RPMs that need attention is small: “We have around 14,000 binary RPMs built and there’s around 10 to 15 RPMs that need any intervention to build in the environment,” says Ferguson.

For example, SNA found that FreeType, the library used for rendering fonts, didn’t build on z. Ferguson discovered that GNU Binutils had a new program called windres for manipulating Windows resources: “Creating Windows resources on z didn’t make much sense, so we had to add some code into the build to ignore it,” says Ferguson. SNA found small issues like this but Ferguson says “99 percent of the time, you can build straight from packages.”

Essentially, the main challenge has been inferring what settings there are for certain RPMs. This inference has an element of trial and error, discovering what is and isn’t needed in a package, for instance, you may need to pre-install packages before building an RPM or you may build an RPM and discover other dependent packages are needed. “But you’ll find there’s a switch that can be utilized to remove the dependency,” says Fergusom. But in the scheme of thousands of RPMs the number of problematic ones account for a small number

Compiling AlmaLinux 9 for z was also made easier to bootstrap as there is a CentOS 9 Stream available for z. However, AlmaLinux 8 was more complicated. As there was no CentOS 8 for z, it meant using Fedora 28 and building a chroot tarball in Mock for the test chroot environment.

For AlmaLinux 8, Ferguson says they have had to build on top of Fedora They had to replace the required packages (RPMs) in the tarball with AlmaLinux RPMs and assets from the Git repositories for a bootstrapping environment for AlmaLinux.

SNA uses a three-pass approach to building a new distribution: “Build once, build a second time using what you’ve just built and build a third time based on what you built the second time around,” Ferguson explains. “By the time you reach the third build, it's pristine; there are no artifacts from anything except your AlmaLinux environment.” And future releases will only get easier. “The first build is always the hardest,” admits Ferguson

Looking to the future, Ferguson says they have ten builders, previously used for ClefOs, that can be put to work. The team is looking at the project’s build node code to see if it could act as a proxy to farm out builds to other builders: “We were building a ClefOS distribution within two or three days, once everything was automated, and that includes building every package three times,” and Ferguson says they’d like to match the success the main distribution has had with the speed of their releases.

“We want to ensure that this version of Almalinux looks like any other endpoint you want to use and behaves like all the others that AlmaLinux offers to the community,” says Ferguson. The goal is for users to be able to simply select it from the build factory and be able to use the AlmaLinux mirrors to make it easy for users to download the latest mainframe edition.

If you’d like to learn more, join the conversation on the Almalinux Mattermost server.

Tenable Providing Nessus Security Checks for AlmaLinux

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:51:58 +0000

Tenable provides coverage of AlmaLinux with the addition of a new Nessus plugin family. The plugin has been released to cover all existing advisories for AlmaLinux.

Nessus is one of the world’s most popular and deployed proprietary vulnerability scanners developed by Tenable. The security checks information is free and available immediately.

As information about new vulnerabilities is discovered and released publicly, The AlmaLinux team updates our errata and OVAL feeds. We’ve been working with the Tenable Research team to help them ingest and utilize those feeds in order to design programs to detect them. These programs are named plugins and are written in the Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL). The plugins contain vulnerability information, a simplified set of remediation actions and the algorithm to test for the presence of the security issue.

“Security is a critical piece of sysadmin and hosting functions, and Tenable is helping make sure that information about vulnerabilities is quickly available. Getting access to timing information is critical to understanding and fixing security issues, and we’re pleased that Tenable is providing this valuable tool publicly,” said Jonathan Wright, Infrastructure Lead for AlmaLinux. “We are continuing to work closely with Tenable’s teams to continue to monitor and improve these services that help AlmaLinux users.”

Customers now have the ability to scan AlmaLinux systems using policies that include Linux security checks. Coverage details for the new AlmaLinux plugin is available on the plugin pages for AlmaLinux.

AlmaLinux and the Top 500 HPC Supercomputers

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 19:15:43 +0000

The Top500 Supercomputers list released for the June 2022 update came out a short while ago and some community members spotted a familiar name on the list--AlmaLinux! CentOS was such a large part of the HPC community and AlmaLinux is continuing that tradition. We've been working closely with many in the HPC space including software and hardware vendors, super computer operators and researchers to make sure things continue to run smoothly for those in the HPC space looking for their next steps and providing a drop-in replacement.

We'd like to give a special thank you to our friends at MEGWARE for their support on these deployments.

AlmaLinux Installations List in Top500:

#184 "Alex" at Universitaet Erlangen - Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen, Germany - AMD EPYC™ 7713 (Milan) with NVIDIA A100 HGX - MEGWARE NF5488A5 - Running AlmaLinux 8.5 - System's Home Page
#301 "VSC-5" at Vienna Scientific Cluster, Austria - AMD EPYC™ 7713 (Milan) - MEGWARE SlideSX®-LC - Running AlmaLinux 8.5 - System's Home Page
#323 "Fritz" at Universitaet Erlangen - Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen, Germany - Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8360Y Processor (Ice Lake) - MEGWARE Server System D50TNP Family - Running AlmaLinux 8.5 - System's Home Page
#339 "HSUper" at Helmut-Schmidt-Universitaet/Universitaet der Bundeswehr Hamburg, Germany - Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8360Y Processor (Ice Lake) - MEGWARE Server System D50TNP Family - Running AlmaLinux 8.5 - System's Home Page

The 184th ranked system also ranks 16th in the Green500 which currently makes it the most energy-efficient HPC system in Germany.

AlmaLinux is proud to be powering scientific research all over the world. It is part of the mission we set out to accomplish, not merely an OS--a community and platform for building the future together.

Stay tuned for more exciting HPC news, including more systems coming soon. If you'd like to help out please join us on The AlmaLinux Community Chat, #almalinux on libera.chat, Twitter or Reddit.

Introducing ALBS: The AlmaLinux Build System

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 20:37:32 +0000

ALBS: Announcing Our New AlmaLinux Build System - Achieving Transparency & Future Roadmap

We here at the AlmaLinux OS Foundation believe that making it easy for community members to build packages and images is a fundamental part of growing and ensuring a healthy enterprise Linux ecosystem. AlmaLinux is fully open source and supported by a growing list of members helping to improve each version. To that end, we started work long ago to make sure that our build system is also transparent and open for use by any organization that is interested in building a better Linux distribution.

Today we are glad to announce the first fruits of our efforts, ALBS, The AlmaLinux Build System. Our build system is available at: https://build.almalinux.org/.

It has been quite some time since we released the source for the AlmaLinux Build System by releasing it under GPLv3 license: https://github.com/AlmaLinux/build-system. However, code will only take you so far.

Since then, it has been bootstrapped, deployed, and used to build AlmaLinux OS 8.6 as well as AlmaLinux OS 9.0 for all four platforms: x86_64, Arm aarch64, PowerPC ppc64le & s390x. This system is also used to generate & publish errata and sign packages.

Today we are adding the next stage of transparency for our build processes by releasing anonymous, read-only access to our build system. This allows anyone to see what packages are being built right now, when a particular package was built, when a package build fails, and all the logs associated with the build process for each and every package.

The User Guide for the new version of the build system can be found on the github site: https://github.com/AlmaLinux/build-system/wiki/AlmaLinux-Build-System-User-Guide

In addition to this initial read-only access, we’ve begun building updates delivering fully functional OVAL files for use by OpenSCAP as well as any other security software. The OVAL files have all the errata information, as well as mitigation recommendations and support for modules too.

Information on OVAL Streams and files can be accessed in the wiki at https://wiki.almalinux.org/documentation/oval-streams.html.

Future Roadmap

By the end of July, we plan to:

Introduce a robust RBAC system to enable and grant access to maintainers and contributors from different organizations to build packages
Add SBOM support for builds by integrating with CodeNotary ensuring package provenance and constitution is well documents and transparent

In the future, we are looking into:

Implement Organization/SIG namespaces within the build system
Add COPR support
Automate VM & container image building & publishing

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation wants to make it easy for people to build packages and images for the “Enterprise Linux” ecosystem for any organization that is interested in doing so.

Help Us Build the Future

If you would like to participate - join us at on the AlmaLinux Community Chat at https://chat.almalinux.org, the AlmaLinux Community on Reddit or catch us on Twitter.

GitLab Moves to AlmaLinux as Supported Platform

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 22:40:08 +0000

GitLab has switched from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux as a supported platform. CentOS itself reached end of life (EOL) on December 31, 2021, and enterprise users in multiple industries are looking at alternatives.

GitLab provides a DevOps platform that empowers organizations to maximize the overall return on software development by delivering software faster and efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. GitLab has an estimated 30 million+ registered users (both Paid and Free) from startups to global enterprises.

“With CentOS going EOL, we needed to choose a build platform to replace our Centos8 build machines. Omnibus GitLab is a way to package different services and tools required to run GitLab, so that most users can install it without laborious configuration. We needed a ‘boring’ solution, and AlmaLinux was asked for by our users,” said DJ Mountney, Engineering Manager, Distribution Build at GitLab.

AlmaLinux is a community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise grade Linux distribution that provides a robust production platform. AlmaLinux is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL. The release of AlmaLinux 8.5 was within 48 hours of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.5 release, cementing AlmaLinux’s position as a CentOS alternative and delivering on its promise of timely releases for the community. Recently, AlmaLinux has also recently surpassed 1 Million Docker pulls, released a build for the PowerPC architecture and is working on additional architecture support for s390x as well as the next major version release.

“AlmaLinux is very excited to be the stage to GitLab’s rockstar, a product which means so much to and is trusted by millions of developers across the world,“ said Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux. “It’s been very validating for us to see widespread developer adoption and GitLab makes us especially proud since it empowers developers to do their best work every single day. They are true friends of the Open Source community, and we are glad that our ‘boring’ solution will help give rise to the next exciting thing.”

GitLab Resources for Using AlmaLinux

Install self-managed GitLab for AlmaLinux - You can download, install and maintain your own GitLab instance using AlmaLinux
GitLab installation minimum requirements

AlmaLinux 9 Now Available!

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 26 May 2022 18:42:35 +0000

Hello Community! The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is proud to announce general availability of AlmaLinux OS 9.0. AlmaLinux 9 supports the following 4 architectures providing full parity with upstream:

ISOs, Live Images, Cloud and Containers

Installation ISOs are nice but AlmaLinux has got you covered for so much more. We have begun updating the following images and those will be available shortly:

Live Media for GNOME, GNOME-mini, KDE, XFCE and more.
Cloud Images
- AWS AMIs for x86_64 and Graviton Instances
- Azure Images for in standard and HPC flavors for x86_64 and aarch64
- Google Cloud (Hi, Googlers!)
- Generic Cloud/Cloud-init for all 4 architectures
- Open Nebula
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for x86_64 and aarch64
Docker images including Platform and UBIs alternatives. We provide a wide variety of containers for your use. Please see our Docker Official Image as well as all AlmaLinux images
Raspberry Pi
Windows Subsystem for Linux

Release Notes and More Information

AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console (cockpit). This release also delivers enhancements for security and compliance, including additional security profiles, greatly improved SELinux performance and user authentication logs. Other various updates include Python 3.9, GCC 11 and the latest versions of LLVM, Rust and Go compilers to make modernizing the applications faster and easier. You can read more about it by checking out the Release Notes.

Visual Enhancements

We know some of y'all will be pleased to see a couple of new wallpapers available in this release. We've also kept the standard ones from AlmaLinux 8, to fit any mood :)

Pitch In

AlmaLinux has accomplished so much in the last year and there's still more to do. Join our community. Become a foundation member (totally free) and claim your right to vote. Give us your feedback and be part of the magic.

Join us in the AlmaLinux Community Chat to get any assistance you need and help others. You can also post a question on our 9.0 Forum, on our AlmaLinux Community on Reddit or catch us on Twitter.

Please report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker.

Have fun with this release and stay tuned for more great announcements and useful tools coming your way soon.

Thank You

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation would like to thank all those involved in the CentOS Stream 9 efforts, CentOS SIGs and others that made this release possible. Thank you to the Fedora and RHEL teams, as well as upstream projects and contributors everywhere. You Rock!

AlmaLinux now available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace

Jack Aboutboul — Sat, 21 May 2022 00:37:35 +0000

Did you know that Oracle has a cloud? Yup, that Oracle. It's pretty cool too.

We're pleased to announce that AlmaLinux images are now available on Oracle's OCI Marketplace for both x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.

Thousands of developers around the world rely on Oracle technology and applications to fuel their applications, projects and businesses. Their massive, global developer network relies on Oracle Cloud to help them build some pretty amazing things. If you wanna see just some of these examples, check out some of the content from Pi Day. That's just scratching the surface, as many enterprise customers rely on the Oracle stack, as well as increasing number of organizations relying on OCI as part of a multi-cloud deployment strategy. They too now have access to the community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise-grade distribution they deserve and have been asking for.

Another element of our collaboration is our long standing friendship with our partners Ampere Computing. Ampere are OCI's hardware provider for their A1 instance types, which are aarch64 architecture. Ampere has some of the fastest, highest performing processors on the planet and above all that, they're also more energy efficient. It's no surprise they are the first "Cloud Native" processor. We'd like to thank their team for work with us on this again and providing awesome technical guidance and just all around collaboration.

Thanks go out to the Oracle Cloud team as well. They have been working hard on engaging more with open source communities and we're glad to be able to work with them on this collaboration as well. Check out AlmaLinux on Oracle Cloud's Free Tier and let us know what you think.

AlmaLinux 8.6 Stable is Now Available!

Jack Aboutboul — Thu, 19 May 2022 20:14:10 +0000

Hi, Community! The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is excited to announce that AlmaLinux OS 8.6 Stable is now available. Just like a flash after the beta release. This stable release is for the x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le architectures and is ready for production installations and to power all your computing needs and workloads. Grab it from the nearest mirror and join us on the AlmaLinux Community Chat to discuss.

Our Live Images, Raspberry Pi, Cloud and Container images updates are in process too, so stay tuned to catch the updates. Don't blink, you might miss them.

Release Notes and More Information

The AlmaLinux 8.6 contains web console enhancements and some brand new System Roles that make system administration simpler. Security updates include upstream versions for the SCAP Security Guide, OpenSCAP and other packages among other improvements. You can read more about this release by checking out the Release Notes.

Are You Finally Gonna Join Our Incredible Community?

Your effort and contributions are what make great releases like this possible. Join us. Please report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker. Join the AlmaLinux Community Chat if you need any help, post a question, or even if you just want to hang out. Reach us on Reddit and on Twitter. Have fun with the new release and as always happy hacking.

AlmaLinux 8.6 "Sky Tiger" Beta - Now Available

Jack Aboutboul — Fri, 06 May 2022 22:33:09 +0000

AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta is now available

Hello World! We proudly present to you AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta "Sky Tiger" for x86_64, ARM and ppc64le architectures.

Installation ISOs are available on mirrors now. Cloud and container images are in progress, so stay tuned for these in the next few days.

As usual, a simple reminder, this is a BETA release. It should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don't mind if something breaks. Now if you wanna test this somehow, somewhere to see how things will work in 8.6 stable, you're on the right track.

Release Notes and More Information

The AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta contains web console enhancements and some brand new System Roles to to make system administration simpler. Security updates include upstream versions for the SCAP Security Guide, OpenSCAP and other packages among other improvements. You can read more about this release by checking out the Release Notes.

What you can do to help?

Test, test, test. Your feedback is what helps make great production releases.

Please report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker. Also, pop into the AlmaLinux Community Chat and join our Testing Channel, post a question on our 8.6 Beta Forum, on our AlmaLinux Community on Reddit or catch us on Twitter.

Please enjoy this Beta release, let us know what you think and stay tuned for more updates and announcements coming soon.

Happy Testing!

AlmaLinux for PowerPC 8.5 Stable Now Available!

Jack Aboutboul — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:34:45 +0000

Hello Сommunity and PowerPC enthusiasts around the world! The AlmaLinux Foundation is proud to announce that the general availability of AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable for ppc64le is live.

Images and Release Notes

You can now grab the image and take a look at the Release Notes for the changelog and installation instructions.

Containers and Cloud Too

All you Container and cloud fans will be happy too. PowerPC 8.5 container images are already available on Docker Hub and should be updated to the latest stable images real soon and we'll providing a generic cloud (cloud-init) image in the repository as well.

Thanks

AlmaLinux would like to express our sincere gratitude to those that lent an extra hand to make this release possible. This release would not have been possible without the tremendous support of both the Oregon State University Open Source Lab as well as researchers from CERN and dozens of other PowerPC community members, who have provided resources, testing, feedback and more to help us build and fine tune every aspect of this release. We proud to be a part of, and work with such an amazing community of people across the globe.

How to help

As always, your contributions, feedback and bug reports help make AlmaLinux great. Please, report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker. Join the party on the AlmaLinux Community Chat and ask any question you have on our AlmaLinux Community Forum and on Reddit. Catch us on Twitter too.

Looking forward to move releases soon!

1 Million Docker pulls and more container updates

Jack Aboutboul — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:26:22 +0000

Wouldya take a look at that? A million! A million pulls of our Docker Library Official Image. What a huge milestone, WOW! We're seriously humbled and we'd like to thank the community, for all the contribution and support. AlmaLinux keeps getting better each day thanks to the efforts of our amazing community.

We've also officially released containers for ppc64le available on all the major registries and we've also gone ahead and updated our containers to 8.5.4 and patched against the latest security updates where applicable. 18 packages have been updated and you can see that work here.

Community members are also doing great work to further streamline our container development process. We're working on using a single working branch to support all the different arch images for each release, instead of a separate branch for each arch. This will greatly help with automation and cut down on development and release times. This will also allow us to maintain repeatable builds and the community to track build history better. This approach will also finally setup staging/weekly/monthly builds so that we can more frequently push out images when there are critical updates.

Finally, we really need to shout out our awesome community members Bala and LKHN for all their amazing work. All this was made possible by their efforts.

You too can be a container hero like Bala and LKHN. Join the AlmaLinux team. If you're looking for more information and details on containers, join our Containers and Cloud SIG on the AlmaLinux Community Chat. We're waiting for you.