AlmaLinux 9.4 beta prepares to tread where RHEL dares not

The bigger RHELatives continue to diverge slightly from Red Hat, with additional drivers and newer kernel versions. The AlmaLinux project has announced the beta of version 9.4, with some small but intriguing differences from Red Hat's plans for RHEL 9.4. The Alma 9.4 beta follows 20 days after Red Hat announced the beta test …

[simpfeld]

What a mess?

What a mess you have created (IBM|Red) Hat!

Must be a total nightmare for ISVs and 3rd party repos to support all this, especially bug reports etc.

Say hello to containers and flatpak's to be the only ways to support all this.

[Korev]

Re: What a mess?

It's a bit scary when you start to consider Oracle Linux as you feel they'll play fewer silly games...

The nearest icon to Nurse, fetch me my meds...

[TVU]

Re: What a mess?

"What a mess you have created (IBM|Red) Hat!"

This is the hand of IBM at work now that they have bought B̶o̶r̶g̶-̶s̶t̶y̶l̶e̶ a̶s̶s̶i̶m̶i̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ Red Hat as they wanted all those CentOS accounts to be monetised.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for them! The faster they get out of this mess, the better.

[Bebu]

Supported hardware.

I am glad Alma have renabled support for RH unsupported LSI SAS HBAs in mpt3sas as it save grabbing the driver from elrepo.

Alma doesn't have to certify hardware for support so including drivers for obsolete hardware shouldn't incur incremental costs.

RH could equally have provided a legacy stream for unsupported hardware which, if installed on a system, removes the host from RH support coverage (except where covered by a $pecial extended "legacy" contract like the ELS for EOL products.)

Rocky's claim that the stable kernel-userland interface is possibly a little disingenuous as normally glibc would need to be rebuilt if only to include any changes to the syscall interface. The kernel-userland stability is possibly more of an artifact of the stable glibc interface acting as a kind of shim.

A particular example that comes to mind is RH's back porting ambient capabilities from the 4.3 kernel series to RHEL7's 3.10 kernels and the required userland support.

Still could be interesting and/or useful having more recent kernels available for *EL9 systems without having to roll your own. I think other rolling/non-LTS distros (ubuntu?) have done this for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Supported hardware.

I can't see anything in the RHEL 9.4 release notes about dropping support for hardware. Any pointers anywhere?

My home lab has some of these things :-(