Software Update: Rocky Linux 8.4

The first stable release of Rocky Linux has been released. The Linux distribution originated as a fork of CentOS, the community edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, after Red Hat indicated that it no longer wanted to continue with it. Rocky Linux is still based on RHEL and also has a migration tool that makes switching easy. The release notes for this release can be found below.

Rocky Linux 8.4

We are pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 (Green Obsidian).

Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. Since this is the first Release of Rocky Linux, the release notes below reflect only changes in upstream functionality between point releases.

Supported Upgrade

Warning: Migration to Rocky Linux 8.4 is not supported from Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1, Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1, or any other release candidates.

Conversion Tool Available

The community has created the migrate2rocky tool to aid in the conversion to Rocky Linux 8.4 from other Enterprise Linux systems. This tool has been tested and is generally known to work, however use of it is at your own risk. Community members have successfully migrated test systems to Rocky Linux from:

• Alma Linux (8.4)
• CentOS Linux (8.4)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (8.4)
• Oracle Linux (8.4)

While migrations may work from other point releases, only migrations from the current minor version release of Enterprise Linux are supported as candidates to upgrade from.

New Modules

Brand new in Rocky Linux 8.4 are the following new module streams:

• Python 3.9
• SWIG 4.0
• Subversion 1.14
• Redis 6
• PostgreSQL 13
• MariaDB 10.5

Major Changes Security

• IPsec VPN provided by Libreswan now supports TCP encapsulation and security labels for IKEv2.
• The scap-security-guide packages have been rebased to version 0.1.54, and OpenSCAP has been rebased to version 1.3.4. These updates provide substantial improvements, including: Improved memory management,
• The fapolicyd framework now provides integrity checking, and the RPM plugin now registers any system update that is handled by either the YUM package manager or the RPM Package Manager.

Networking

• Nmstate is a network API for hosts and fully supported in Rocky Linux 8.4. The nmstate packages provide a library and the nmstatectl command-line utility to manage host network settings in a declarative manner.
• The Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an in-kernel data-forwarding mechanism to route traffic flow across enterprise networks. For example, you can add tc filters for managing packets received from specific ports or carrying specific types of traffic, in a consistent way.
• The iproute2 utility introduces three new traffic control (tc) actions; mac_push, push_eth, and pop_eth to add MPLS labels, build an Ethernet header at the beginning of the packet, and drop the outer Ethernet header respectively.

kernel

• proactive compaction regularly initiates memory compaction work before a request for allocation is made. Therefore, latency for specific memory allocation requests is lowered.
• A new implementation of slab memory controller for the control groups technology is now available in Rocky Linux 8.4. The slab memory controller brings improvement in slab utilization, and enables to shift the memory accounting from the page level to the object level. As a result, you can observe a significant drop in the total kernel memory footprint and positive effects on memory fragmentation.
• The time namespace feature is available in Rocky Linux 8.4. 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.
• Rocky Linux 8.4 supports the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) kernel module set in 8th and 9th generation Intel Core Processors.

High Availability and Clusters

• A persistent Pacemaker resource agent that maintains state data can detect failures asynchronously and inject a failure into Pacemaker immediately without waiting for the next monitor interval. A persistent resource agent can also speed up cluster response time for services with a high state overhead, since maintaining state data can reduce the state overhead for cluster actions such as start, stop, and monitor by not invoking the state separately for each action.

Compilers and Development Tools

• The following compiler toolsets have been updated:

• GCC Toolset 10
• LLVM Toolset 11.0.0
• Rust Toolset 1.49.0
• Go Toolset 1.15.7

Identity Management

• Rocky Linux 8.4 provides Ansible modules for automated management of role-based access control (RBAC) in Identity Management (IdM), an Ansible role for backing up and restoring IdM servers, and an Ansible module for location management.