Summary

Our teams are working to coordinate the many individuals and organizations that have offered to help advance The Rocky Linux Foundation, Inc. (Rocky Linux). The core team is working to lay the infrastructure that will support the legal entity and the engineering efforts required to deliver and support an initial release. Updates regarding project news, release dates, and more will be announced on our forums, website, and other social media platforms.

Timeline

Transparency with the community and for those that will be relying on Rocky Linux to supplant their CentOS 8 installations before support expiration is paramount. We will soon be communicating a timeline for the delivery of the following:

• Build systems and infrastructure readiness
• Automatic package build infrastructures
• When the testing package repository will be made public
• Installer testing readiness
• ETA for length of time needed for community testing
• Release candidate availability

We are targeting Q2 2021 to deliver our first release of Rocky Linux, made available not only in standard commercial regions, but also GovCloud, and China.

Over the past three weeks, here is some of the progress we’ve made:

Infrastructure

• We have selected and vetted auditing, logging, and user account management tooling.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS):
  • The team selected AWS as the primary build platform for development of Rocky Linux. AWS was chosen primarily to protect the integrity of the software supply chain for Rocky Linux.
  • Unfortunately, donated hardware and rack space isn’t sufficient to meet our supply chain integrity needs.
  • Traditional physical hardware separate from our production build environment will still be necessary, and we expect a large portion of our infrastructure will exist outside of AWS for the purposes of business continuity, cost, and platform agnosticity.
    • We have outlined an infrastructure to best secure and facilitate our engineering efforts using multiple VPCs, subnets, and regions for high availability.
• Data Centers:
  • We are negotiating with several data center providers for the secure hosting of our physical infrastructure.
    • After we have our physical infrastructure provider solidified, we will reach back out to those that have offered to donate hardware .
    • Discussions with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) regarding resources are in the works.

The core tenets of the Infrastructure Team are:

• To provide a platform for the automatic and secure builds of packages and components which will allow for community participation without sacrificing security or trust in the resulting packages
• The integrity of the build pipeline and software supply chain are paramount.
• Be as vendor and platform agnostic as possible. Avoid vendor lock-in.
• Be transparent with the community, to the extent possible and practical.

Release Engineering and Packaging

• The build process for Rocky Linux will use Koji and MBS.
• We are developing scripts and build tools to create a pipeline that allows pulling sources, debranding, and building through Koji and Mock.
• The progress of proof of concepts and processes utilized by the Rocky Linux build process, including all errors and dependencies, is being documented in the wiki.

Security

• The Security team has drafted a Data Classification Policy, which will be made available for public comment pending review.
• Groups, members, and permissions structures for the build infrastructure have been laid out for review and evaluation.
• In parallel with the infrastructure team, we have architected and designed AWS network and security topologies aligned with best practices and security standards.
• Work has started on OpenSCAP documents for popular STIGs.
• Plans are being made with the goal of Rocky Linux becoming FIPS compliant.

Web

• In only 12 days, our forums have received nearly 150K page views.
• Bandwidth to GitHub resources has exceeded the current plan, requiring an upgrade.

Community

• We have chosen Red Barn Creative Team (formerly Hackerthreads ) as the designated / authorized vendor to sell Rocky Linux branded merchandise. We are awaiting proofs from their designers to present to the community, and will as well be accepting submissions for designs.
• Over 370 people have responded to our form for registering volunteers and supporters.
• A blog and mailing list for future announcements and community updates is in development.
• We have outgrown Slack due to the size of the community and required feature sets, and will therefore be migrating to Mattermost. This open source platform has a number of features we’ll be taking advantage of, including: an IRC bridge, multi-factor authentication, advanced logging / auditing / security capabilities, and fidelity in channel and access permissions.
• Social media following:
  • 4.3K active members on Slack
  • 169 followers on LinkedIn with 1.3K post impressions
  • 4K followers on Twitter with an average of 22K impressions and 3575 interactions per tweet
  • 3K members in /r/RockyLinux on Reddit.

Special Interest Groups (SIG)

• We have received a number of requests for SIGs on a variety of different topics:
  • Desktop / Laptop
  • Enhanced Security
  • Kubernetes / Cloud Native
  • Minimal Install / OS Bootstrap -Storage appliance
    • HPC and next generation HPC
• The evolution of a SIG should result in optional package repositories and/or custom installers.
• We will need leaders for SIGs as well as proposals.
• Timelines for these proposals will be coming soon.

Note: Rocky Linux is first and foremost a freely available Enterprise Linux clone. SIGs will optionally enhance that base and provide extra packages and capabilities to that stable base. At no point will a SIG affect the default core of Rocky Linux.

Sponsors

• We have a number of companies who have stepped up to sponsor the Rocky Linux Foundation in the form of developers, hardware, cloud instances, and money.
• Sponsorship will have different levels, and we are happy to speak with organizations interested in helping.
• All contributors will be publicly thanked on our website.

Legal

• The Rocky Linux Foundation, Inc. has been registered as a legal entity in the United States (Delaware).
• An application for 501(​c)(3) non-profit status will be submitted as we mature and can afford the legal representation to do so.
• We are considering licensing for our data that will enable the greatest flexibility for our community. At present, the team is leaning towards the 3 Clause BSD license, but community input is welcome on this decision.

Localization

• A localization category has been created on our forums, with many people interested in helping with translations to a number of languages including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Afrikaans, Greek, Turkish, and many more.
• We will be working to ensure future newsletters are translated to as many languages as possible.

If you have an interest in assisting with translations, please reach out via the localization category of our forums.

Lastly, this wouldn’t at all be possible without you. We’re immensely grateful for the community’s enthusiasm, excitement, and help. Rocky Linux is, and will remain a community-driven effort.

If you would like to contribute to Rocky Linux, please take a moment to fill out our participation form if you haven’t already done so. This form will allow us to expand and gauge interest in teams.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, please reach out to us via email at: hello@rockylinux.org.

Summary

Release engineering is on pace with the timelines previously documented to provide a release of Rocky Linux by Q2 2021. The infrastructure team is working on automation in their area to facilitate the deployment of build infrastructure in additional regions. We’ve finalized our sponsorship model, and are as well open to partnerships for deeper collaboration. We’ve drafted our organizational structure, as well as our community charter. Finally, we’ve secured authorization from The Linux Foundation to license Rocky Linux under the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is the official legal entity that represents Rocky Linux and fosters its growth.

Timeline

In our previous update, we listed a number of items and gave dates to them. We remain committed to delivering an initial release of Rocky Linux by Q2. Here are what we listed previously, and where we stand with each:

• Build systems and infrastructure readiness - January 31 [DONE]
• Automatic package build infrastructures - January 31 [DONE]
• Testing package repository made public - February 28 [In progress]
• Installer testing readiness - February 28 [In progress]
• ETA for length of time needed for community testing - March 31 [In progress]
• Release candidate availability - March 31 [On Pace]

Legal

The Linux Foundation has granted us a sub-license to legally use “Linux” in the distribution’s name “Rocky Linux.” We have renamed the “Rocky Linux Foundation” (RESF) to the “Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation” and changed it to a Public Benefits Organization in Delaware.

Infrastructure

The build infrastructure for our first deployment in us-east-2 was completed and handed off to the Development team.

The next steps for the Infrastructure team is to ensure documentation (both internal and external) is accurate and up-to-date, and then to finalize the translation of the current infrastructure to automation tooling so we can replicate deployments to additional regions. These regions include Development, us-west-2, and GovCloud. Alerting automation is also in progress, so not only are we monitoring our metrics and syslogs, but when issues arise we are receiving the appropriate notifications to enable the team to respond accordingly in a timely manner. We continue to make progress toward an alternate build infrastructure to AWS and hope to have an announcement by the March community update.

Release Engineering and Packaging

The team is working on building packages and getting the processes ready to assemble the final release. This includes things like validating the operation of Pungi (repo/image compositions), and nailing the package build order. An overview of the build process can be found on our wiki. We’re seeking volunteers that can assist with debranding, so if this is an area you’d like to contribute, please reach out! An overview of the steps for debranding is on the wiki, with a more detailed guide to shortly follow.

Merchandise

Muckles Inc has begun shipping orders that have been placed, and people have started to receive those items. They were a little surprised by the huge amount of orders that were placed, so it has taken them a little bit longer to process those requests. We’re thankful for your patience, and of course they are still accepting new orders for Rocky Linux merch. Please share photos of your Rocky Linux merchandise with us on Twitter, the forums, or Mattermost!

Community

Community Charter

Responsibility to the community is critical to our success. To that end, we’ve published The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation Community Charter, and you can read that here. We consider our community charter one of our most important documents, as it communicates to the community what our principles, values, and intentions are. Our responsibility to the community is outlined in our charter; the community’s responsibility is to hold us accountable. We will be embedding this charter in the distribution of the core Rocky Linux operating system, ensuring the longevity and persistence of these principles.

FAQ

We’ve expanded upon and published a FAQ which addresses a number of questions that we’ve received. Questions such as “If Rocky Linux is just a respin of RHEL, what’s taking so long for a release candidate?” and “If you’re not just repackaging RHEL, then what exactly are you doing?” and more are all addressed. We will be adding to the FAQ over time based on questions the community surfaces.

Mattermost

The migration from Slack to Mattermost has been completed, and all of the legacy Slack channels have been archived. We’ve also set up a bridge from Mattermost to IRC, so if you’re in a Mattermost channel and you see [freenode] BOT , that’s what that’s about. On IRC, Mattermost messages will come from the rlf user, a username subject to change.

Lastly, be sure to check out the latest episode of “What Matters” a podcast by Mattermost where Community Manager Jordan Pisaniello sits down to discuss Rocky Linux.

Documentation

The Documentation team has been rapidly growing and has made great progress toward putting forward documentation of the highest quality, with a number of community members stepping up and taking ownership of the massive effort. The team is organizing around a number of topics, such as:

• Translation
• Security
• Packaging
• Editorial
• Administration

and more. For the translation effort, we’re looking for volunteers to support the localization effort into non-English languages.

The team meets virtually once a month to plan and review progress, with scheduling discussed in advance in the Documentation channel.

Please join us on Mattermost and indicate the language or subject area you can assist with. You can also create an issue or pull request on Github to propose a new documentation topic or to help fix existing documentation.

Finally, we would like a special recognition of the Documentation Admin team—Calder Sheagren and Ezequiel Bruni—for helping to keep us organized and on-task.

Sponsors and Donations

We’ve finalized the levels for sponsorships, which provide various benefits based on annual commitments. The tiers and benefits are as follows:

Tier 1 - Principal Sponsors

• “Principal Sponsor” level media kit and rights to use trademarks
• Top placement of Company Logo on Sponsorship page
• Includes a link to company’s website
• 180 character summary of company
• Rotating logo/link featured on our main landing page
• Quote from the RESF leadership team to be included in companies marketing collateral about support for RESF
• Collaboration with the RESF team on individualized case studies, white papers, webinars, or other material

Tier 2

• “Tier 2” level media kit and rights to use trademarks
• Inclusion of Company Logo on Sponsorship page
• Includes a link to company’s website
• 90 character company tagline
• Quote from the RESF leadership team to be included in companies marketing collateral about support for RESF

Tier 3

• “Tier 3” level media kit and rights to use trademarks
• Inclusion of Company Logo on Sponsorship page
• Includes a link to company’s website

Tier 4

• “Tier 4” level media kit and rights to use trademarks
• Inclusion of name in dedicated section on Sponsorship page
• Includes a link to company’s website

We would also like to recognize 45drives and OpenDrives, who have recently signed on to be Principal Sponsors.

If either you or your organization is interested in sponsoring The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, please contact us at sponsor@rockylinux.org.

We’d also like to send out a very special ‘thank you’ to the individuals who have donated! Your contributions are very much appreciated.

Finally, we have the option of forming partnerships with organizations. These are not based on any annual fee, but are instead geared toward ongoing collaboration and strategic initiatives. Contact us at partners@rockylinux.org if is something your organization would like to explore.

Organizational Structure

We believe in ensuring that all perspectives are heard and taken into consideration while maintaining a strong commitment to our vision, mission, goals, integrity, and values with the highest degree of transparency possible. We count on the community, contributors, donors, sponsors, and partners all to hold us accountable to our pledge.

The organization of RESF is composed of a tiered structure of teams, each including three primary roles: leads, deputies, and members. This ensures that all members have visibility and say into governance and decision making, ensuring equal representation across the organization. You can learn more about how we’ve structured ourselves here.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, or if you would like to help out, feel free to discuss below or send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Summary

In the three-plus weeks since our last community update, a lot has happened. Frustratingly—but also necessarily—for many of you, the progress we’ve made has been behind the scenes. We’ve been working diligently to setup the build infrastructure (our top priority), position ourselves to accept donations (huge thank you to those that have expressed interest), prepare to migrate from Slack to Mattermost, and sort out the necessary organizational structures to support the engineering efforts that will be going into Rocky Linux. We want to thank everyone that’s stayed up well into the early hours of the morning with us working on all of the above and more; it’s this kind of effort that constantly reminds us how remarkably dedicated and supportive this community is.

Timeline

In our previous update, we listed a number of items we were working on establishing dates for. We remain committed to delivering an initial release of Rocky Linux by Q2. Here’s some detail behind that:

• Build systems and infrastructure readiness - January 31
• Automatic package build infrastructures - January 31
• When the testing package repository will be made public - February 28
• Installer testing readiness - February 28
• ETA for length of time needed for community testing - March 31
• Release candidate availability - March 31

Infrastructure

The team’s efforts to provision community services and build infrastructure continue to progress. Thanks to a great amount of community support, our first site is currently being deployed inside the us-east-2 region of AWS. With subsequent planned deployments in AWS us-west-2 & GovCloud as a fast follow, we are also in discussions with other major cloud and colocation providers as a complement to AWS.

After ongoing discussions with members of the community and foundation partners, we are also pleased to announce our plans to treat both x86_64 and ARM64 as priority architectures for the project, with builds for both to release concurrently.

Release Engineering and Packaging

A number of people have expressed interest in contributing to the development of Rocky Linux, but were unsure as to how, what tasks were upcoming, and what skills were needed. We’ve created an outline for all of that and more, and you can check it out on the forums. This includes information on debranding audits, package maintenance and testing, documentation, end-product testing, and includes a sketch of what the development workflow will look like.

Security

We recently published a draft of our data classification policy, which outlines sensitivity and appropriate restrictions, along with details of each. The full outline is available on our forums for comment and review.

Merchandise

The official Rocky Linux store is live! This store is brought to you by our friends over at Muckles Ink, a subsidiary of Red Barn Creative Team. Pledge your support to the project with some limited run ‘Early Supporter’ shirts, hoodies, fleeces, hats, and more.

Community

We have finished standing up Mattermost as our alternative chat platform to Slack. We will no longer be monitoring or responding to queries in Slack, and will be closing the existing Rocky Linux related Slack channels on 2021-02-01 19:00:00 EST.

Please join us at https://chat.rockylinux.org! We have channels setup for:

• Announcements
• Branding
• Community
• Dev/Anaconda
• Dev/Autobuilder
• Dev/General
• Dev/Packaging
• Documentation
• Infrastructure
• Introductions
• General
• Legal
• Media
• Off-Topic
• Security
• Testing
• Web

If you’re unfamiliar with Mattermost, be sure to check out their User’s Guide.

An IRC bridge to relevant channels is planned.

We would love to see some designs from our community for future Rocky Linux merchandise. If you’re interested in creating and sharing your own design, please be sure to submit your ideas and vote in the forums before the deadline on 2021-01-27 18:00:00 EST.

Sponsors and Donations

We’ve added a Sponsors section to our website, and are in the process of working through a number of different sponsorship levels. If you or your organization has an interest in sponsoring Rocky Linux, now is the time to let us know your ideas.

We have had many offers for corporate sponsorships and while we are still working out the precise structure, we have identified a number of Tier 1 sponsors:

• Ctrl IQ Inc.: Ctrl IQ is Gregory Kurtzer’s company and has provided the initial capital for expenses, legal, etc.
• AWS: Provides the core build infrastructure
• Mattermost: Through their non-profit program, allowing us to use enterprise features through their E20 license to enable enhancements for things like logging, and auditing.

If you or your organization is interested in sponsoring The Rocky Linux Foundation, please contact us at sponsor@rockylinux.org.

In addition to sponsorships, we’ve been asked about donations. This feature is now accessible from our website, and supports both one-time or recurring (monthly, quarterly, or annually) donations. We are partnered with NeonOne for this capability who specializes in donations, and management tools for nonprofits. It is important for us to reiterate how thankful we are for the people who’ve expressed an interest in donating and being part of this amazing community!

Documentation

We’ve recently added a Documentation team and are working on ideas and organization toward delivering quality, engaging content. This team will be responsible for hosting ‘brown bags,’ where a subject matter expert will guide users through live demonstrations on topics of interest. They’ll also be hosting Principal Engineering Talks, where experts will walk through the nuts and bolts on a number of areas, from packaging and installation to kernel development and networking. Please let us know if you have any ideas on topics you’d like to see presented.

If you’re interested in working on the Documentation team, you can view the details for their first meeting in the forums, which is scheduled for 2021-01-20 22:00:00 UTC.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, feel free to discuss below or send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Summary

There’s been a flurry of activity this month as we approach the general availability of our release candidate for Rocky Linux 8.3. The Development team has been holding regular hack-a-thon sessions with the community in our ~Dev/Packaging channel, we’re now self hosting (no longer dependent on upstream packages), and a minimal ISO was produced and tested. The Infrastructure team has been working on getting Mirror Manager stood up, and we’ve been in contact with many of the folks who’ve offered to host mirrors. The Website team has our downloads page ready to go, as well as our documentation engine, where the Docs team will be locating all the great content they’ve authored. We’ve also started a Testing team, which will be responsible for the validation and error reporting of our release candidate. Finally, we’re excited to announce that Fastly and NAVER Cloud have been onboarded as Partners (and we have a few more on the way!).

Timeline

• Build systems and infrastructure readiness - January 31 [DONE]
• Automatic package build infrastructures - January 31 [DONE]
• Testing package repository made public - February 28 [DONE]
• Installer testing readiness - February 28 [DONE]
• ETA for length of time needed for community testing - April 30 [On Pace]
• Release candidate availability - April 30 [On Pace]

Team Updates

Community

The ~Merchandise channel has been created on our Mattermost server, along with the @merchcustomerservice account (also on the forums), for all merchandising related inquiries.

The community team is looking for new members! If you’re interested in engaging the community on social media, organizing events, and working with other teams to support community initiatives; look no further. Please join us on the ~Community channel on our Mattermost server and reach out to @jorp for more details.

Events

• We have added timestamps for all questions in video description from our 2021-03-26 Q&A Session
• Wolves Linux Users Group will be hosting a talk on 2021-04-28 at 15:30 ET [19:30 UTC] with Gregory Kurtzer and R. Leigh Hennig. You can find more details about this event on Meetup here.

Documentation

The main documentation site is still being prepared, but for now you can find collaboration and localization for all documentation on GitHub. Be sure to check out the ~Documentation channel on Mattermost and reach out to @wale if you are interested in helping this effort! Lots will be coming in the coming months, you are invited, come and help.

Infrastructure

Mirror Manager

If you’re interested in mirroring Rocky Linux, we’ve set up Mirror Manager, please email infrastructure@rockylinux.org or drop a line in the ~Infrastructure channel on Mattermost..

Maintenance

We have successfully upgraded our Mattermost server to 5.34.2. You can find the maintenance announcement on the forums, and check out Mattermost’s changelog here for more details.

status.rockylinux.org

We now have a status page available at status.rockylinux.org for real time monitoring of Rocky Linux related systems.

Bugzilla

We’re now using Bugzilla for bug tracking. If you’re interested in how it was set up, check out this GitHub commit to our Ansible playbooks.

Legal

• We’ve created a privacy policy that we’ll be publishing shortly that details what we track, why, and how, which will allow us to collect basic, anonymized analytics on our website. We’ll be using Matomo for this, and will announce when that’s enabled.
• We’ve joined the Open Innovation Network, which helps us and its members protect against patent trolling.

Release Engineering

We have released a devtools repository to help configure a build development for Rocky Linux package maintainers. It’s a great way to help you get started working on failed packages as reported in our Koji build system.

Mustafa Gezen has also released a work-in-progress of a distrobuild utility as well as srpmproc, which help tremendously in our build efforts. Both are licensed under MIT.

Testing

The Testing team is growing quickly! Please make sure you join the ~Testing channel on our Mattermost server if you are interested in helping get Rocky Linux released GA. The team has now met twice to discuss both human and automated testing of Rocky Linux releases as well as hardware certification. You can check out our ongoing collaboration in this specification document. For now we’re using Google Docs just until the wiki is ready to host the Testing team, so if you need access ping Jessica Jonutz on Mattermost (@jessjonutz).

Special Interest Group Updates

Images

There’s plenty of work to do around preparing and testing various virtual machine and cloud image and container formats for Rocky, and we have a new ~Images channel dedicated to just that. Drop in and see what’s going on!

Sponsors and Donations

Fastly

Fastly has stepped up in a huge way to help get in front of the content we need to serve. Currently fronting our Mattermost instance, they’re going to be helping out with their CDN service when we go live with the release candidate. We really can’t overstate how grateful we are for their massive support here.

NAVER Cloud

We’re excited to announce our partnership with NAVER Cloud, whose cloud infrastructure and resources will be enormously helpful in ensuring long-term sustainability and independence for the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation.

Media

As we are now approaching the general availability of Rocky Linux, we welcome media inquiries and involvement! Please reach out to media@resf.org for interviews, quotes, information, inclusion on press releases, etc.

Please be on the lookout for another update this Friday, April 30 with more details about our first release candidate!

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Summary

This month’s community update is being released a little bit later than the previous updates, as we had hoped to have additional information to announce regarding an initial build image for testing. Unfortunately we’ve had to revise our previous update for a release candidate from March 31 to April 30, due to complications in the build efforts. We continue to make steady progress, and are optimistic about our revised timeline.

With respect to our build infrastructure, we’re pleased to announce a partnership with Fosshost as an alternate build environment. This partnership will allow us to maintain independence in accordance with our core value of remaining free of any single entity’s control or influence. We’re excited to work with Fosshost, and are grateful for their enthusiastic support.

Finally, we’re happy to announce that MontaVista has not only signed on as a Principal Sponsor, but as a partner as well, leading the effort on an embedded Special Interest Group (SIG).

Timeline

In our previous update, we listed a number of items and gave dates to them. Here are what we listed previously, and where we stand with each:

• Build systems and infrastructure readiness - January 31 [DONE]
• Automatic package build infrastructures - January 31 [DONE]
• Testing package repository made public - February 28 [DONE]
• Installer testing readiness - February 28 [In progress]
• ETA for length of time needed for community testing - April 30 [In progress]
• Release candidate availability - April 30 [In progress]

We have updated our goals for community testing and our release candidate availability from March 31 to April 30. While slipping on this date from our previous estimate will come as a disappointment to many, we feel it’s important to inform the community why we’ve had to take additional time for our release.

While repackaging and building the core operating system takes significant time and effort, this is not the largest effort we’ve been driving toward. Instead, it has been the establishment of more foundational structures that underpin everything we do here at the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF).

Here are some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves, and some of the challenges we’ve set about to solve:

• How do we include as wide a developer community as possible?
• How do we ensure that everyone who wants to contribute is able to do so?
• How do we organize such a large community toward common goals?
• How do we build the necessary infrastructure to facilitate all of the above?
• How do we protect the future of Rocky Linux, enabling those who come after us, and ensuring that Rocky stays free and open source long into the future?

Right away, we’ve gone about things differently. If all we were looking to do was to repackage the operating system, we would have done so already. But we felt the problems that needed to be addressed were bigger than that, and so that’s what we’ve set about addressing. In doing that, we’ve created an infrastructure similar to Fedora so we can allow many developers to be part of the development, responsibility, and future of Rocky Linux.

Rocky Linux is more than just an operating system, and the RESF is more than just a legal entity. It’s a community, a vision, and a commitment to an ideal. That takes time to get right, and is critical to ensuring we all have the foundation of stability for decades to come.

We’re grateful for your patience, support, enthusiasm, and generosity. We’re dedicated to ensuring the long-term growth and prosperity of the community and its projects, and we’re excited for the dividends that will pay.

Community

• Thanks to all that came out to our first Live Q&A session on YouTube! As promised, the session was recorded and available on our YouTube channel. Feedback is strongly encouraged, so please let us know what you thought on the forums or Mattermost.

• We have scheduled a live Q&A session with the UK Linux User’s Group, set for [date=2021-04-28 time=15:30:00 timezone=“America/New_York” timezones=“UTC”] . You can view scheduling and additional information for that on meetup.

Infrastructure

• We have partnered with Fosshost as an alternate platform for our build infrastructure.
• Documentation and automation efforts make progress with help from a number of contributors. We are looking for more ways to expand community involvement in infrastructure operations overall.
• We are beginning to build out our tier-0 mirror infrastructure in preparation for onboarding community mirrors.

Legal

• Our Contributor’s Agreement has been finalized, and is available for review at https://accounts.rockylinux.org. Anyone wishing to contribute must create an account, read, and agree to the Contributor’s Agreement.

Release Engineering and Packaging

Here’s how things stand with the build efforts, with some detail on the kinds of problems we’ve been working through:

• The BaseOS repository has been resolved and a majority of it can be built
• Huge thanks to Skip Grube and the others in ~Dev/Packaging that stepped up to resolve the random problems
• We’re still working on AppStream and PowerTools
• Repositories that rely on other repositories have introduced complexity
• The installer (Anaconda) lives in AppStream and relies on other modules

Want to help out with the effort? Join ~Dev/Packaging on Mattermost and get involved!

As always, if you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Sincerely,

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the general availability of the Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.

To download the release, visit https://rockylinux.org/download.

FAQ

What is a release candidate?

A release candidate is a beta version of a product that has the potential to be stable. The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.

Where can I download the release candidate?

https://rockylinux.org/download

How can I help mirror the release candidate and future Rocky Linux releases?

Please email mirrors@rockylinux.org to express your interest.

Can I use the release candidate in production?

Under no circumstance should you use a release candidate in a production environment. A release candidate is provided for testing and validation purposes only.

I encountered a bug while testing the release candidate, what can I do?

First, create an account using Rocky Linux Account Services, then head over to our Bugzilla server to report any bugs.

How can I get involved with the Testing team?

Please join the ~Testing channel on our Mattermost server to get started. There’s also a testing topic on the forums for more durable conversation.

Where can I find the latest news about Rocky Linux?

Stay tuned to our website, Twitter, LinkedIn, forums, and other platforms listed in our link directory for the latest announcements.

What if I have feedback or my question wasn’t answered here?

Please email us: hello@rockylinux.org and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

This release is the culmination of months of hard work from every corner of the community. What started in a comment thread on a Red Hat blog in December of 2020 grew to a community over ten thousand strong in a Slack channel in a matter of days. From there you pulled together to build teams around infrastructure, branding, website, development, special interest groups, and more. By February of 2021, over 80 million hits had been recorded across various social media platforms and news sites.

And now, four months later, we have a true open enterprise community operating system. More than that, we have a community, extending far beyond the scope of simply a Linux distribution.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our sponsors and our partners, whose contribution of resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure were all critical in supporting our efforts:

• CIQ
• 45Drives
• Amazon Web Services
• Fosshost
• Fastly
• GitLab
• Mattermost
• MontaVista
• NAVER Cloud
• OpenDrives

This is just the beginning. Our commitment to you is the long-lasting development and support of an open enterprise operating system by the community, and for the community.

We have so much more to do. From testing and validation of the core OS to the refinement of our build infrastructure and special interest groups, the work is not done. Come build the next open enterprise operating system with us at https://rockylinux.org.

Summary

This has been a very exciting month for us. In the early hours of May 1, we published our release candidate for Rocky Linux 8.3. (If you haven’t yet, feel free to download that and get to testing it, and let us know about any bugs you find.) We established a new Testing team, and they’ve been busy putting the RC through its paces. We’re pleased that we’ve encountered so few bugs, which is a testament to the hard work our release engineering team did in putting it together.

We also saw Red Hat release RHEL 8.4 on May 18, and are very excited about preparing our release candidate of 8.4. As soon as it’s ready and testing is completed, we anticipate being able to announce the general availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for production use. Keep a close eye out for the announcement of the 8.4 release candidate, which should be coming soon.

Since we’re heads down squashing bugs, building packages, and debugging, you might notice that this update is lighter than others.

Team Updates

Community

Content Creators

Have some experience with video production and editing? Interested in contributing to Rocky Linux? We’re looking for some content creators within our community interested in making video for our YouTube channel.

Live content more your thing? We would love to have community members give talks on a particular technical topic, or share a project that shows off Rocky Linux.

Please reach out via the ~Community channel on our Mattermost server, or via email: community@rockylinux.org.

IRC

All of our channels have been migrated from Freenode to Libera.Chat, and are now bridged to our Mattermost server. You can find the bridge’s channel mappings on the wiki.

Documentation

Some new developments and initiatives are brewing within the Rocky documentation group.

• We hosted this month’s team meeting/get-together on May 14, 2021.
• Individuals within the documentation group have been exploring and working with the Rocky web development team to test other platforms for serving and managing the docs.rockylinux.org platform. Thanks to @FromOZ and @antoine for spearheading this effort.
• We’ve had an uptick in the number of folks doing actual translations of existing Rocky Linux guides and as well as authoring brand new content in various languages.

Release Engineering

Now that RHEL 8.4 has landed, we’re working to build a release candidate. Rocky Linux 8.4 will be our first GA release. As a reminder we will not officially support an upgrade path from 8.3 RC to 8.4 GA, or from 8.4 RC to 8.4 GA.

Testing

If you’re interested in helping us test the Rocky Linux 8.4 RC, please join our Testing team! The Testing team meets weekly on Thursdays at 18:00 ET. There’s live chat on our Mattermost server, and durable discussion on our forums. Please be sure to report any bugs you encounter.

Media

We welcome media inquiries and involvement! Please reach out to media@resf.org for interviews, quotes, information, inclusion on press releases, etc.

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the availability of the Rocky Linux 8.4 Release Candidate for:

Please note that a release candidate is not suitable for production use. You can report any bugs or issues here. The upgrade from Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 to Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1 is not supported, meaning it will not be tested nor documented.

To download the release, visit https://rockylinux.org/download.

Release notes are available here.

Once this release candidate has been validated, we will transition Rocky Linux 8.4 to General Availability. If our 8.4 RC goes as smoothly as our 8.3 RC did, you won’t have long to wait.

FAQ:

What upgrade paths are supported?

Upgrading between release candidates, or from a release candidate to a stable release will not be supported. Release candidates are not suitable for production use, and are to be used for testing purposes only.

Will there be a Rocky Linux 8.4 RC2 before Rocky Linux 8.4 GA?

No, we plan to iron out any reported bugs in Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1 and then move straight towards a GA release.

Will there be a Rocky Linux 8.3 RC2, or a Rocky Linux 8.3 GA?

There will not be a stable release of Rocky Linux 8.3. The first stable release of Rocky Linux will be 8.4.

More FAQ can be found on our website here.

We have our amazing community to thank for working around the clock in many time zones to bring you this release candidate. You’ve downloaded Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 more than 118,000 times from our website, not including our 65+ active community mirrors.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our sponsors and our partners, whose contribution of resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure were all critical in supporting our efforts:

• CIQ
• 45Drives
• Amazon Web Services
• Fosshost
• Fastly
• GitLab
• Mattermost
• MontaVista
• NAVER Cloud
• OpenDrives

This is just the beginning. Our commitment to you is the long-lasting development and support of an open enterprise operating system by the community, and for the community.

We have so much more to do. From testing and validation of the core OS to the refinement of our build infrastructure and special interest groups, the work is not done. Come build the next open enterprise operating system with us at https://rockylinux.org.

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for the following architectures:

Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems. Free community support is available through the Rocky Linux Mattermost, IRC, and forums. Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ.

Download Rocky Linux 8.4 Release Notes

The following are also available:

• Container Images
  • Docker Hub
  • Quay.io
• Cloud Offerings
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Google Cloud Platform

Stay tuned for announcements as we expand our offerings.

Bugs or issues can be reported via Bugzilla.

Release Party

Be sure to tune into our live release party Saturday, June 26 00:00 UTC on YouTube. More details available on the forums here.

Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that’s who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you.

Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It’s a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles—embedded even within our repositories and ISOs—are immutable.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our sponsors and our partners, whose contribution of resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure were all critical in supporting our efforts:

• 45Drives
• Amazon Web Services
• CIQ
• Fastly
• Fosshost
• GitLab
• Google
• Mattermost
• MontaVista
• NAVER Cloud
• OpenDrives

Each one brings something special to the community, and we’re grateful for their support.

This is just the beginning, and the RESF is more than just Rocky Linux—it’s a home for those that believe that open source isn’t just a switch that can be toggled at will, and that projects that many rely on not be subject to the whims of a few. To this point, you can easily find all of our sources, our build infrastructure, Git repositories, and everything else anyone would need to fork our work and ensure that it continues if need be. Expect more from the RESF in the coming weeks and months.

When we announced our release candidate, we asked you to come build the next free, open, community enterprise operating system with us. Now we’re asking you for more: join us as we build our community.

“We set out to develop a free, open, community enterprise operating system that is bug-for-bug compatible with the upstream Enterprise Linux standard. What we built is so much more: a community.”

• Gregory Kurtzer, Executive Director, Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation

Summary

After seven months of long, hard work, we are beyond excited to announce that Rocky Linux 8.4 has reached General Availability for x86_64 and aarch64! We made fantastic progress with our release candidates and are happy to recommend this version for installation on your production systems. A migration tool is available in our GitHub repository, and release notes are available on our new documentation site.

Within 72 hours of launch, Rocky’s assets have been downloaded nearly 70,000 times from our Tier0 mirror, served from Fastly—not counting the number of downloads from our mirrors, of which we have nearly 100—and we count approximately 10,000 downloads of our torrent file.

To say that Rocky Linux 8.4 is popular would be an understatement.

You, the community, made this happen. We can’t begin to express our gratitude for your support. Watching the community grow from a comment in a blog post in December to what it is today, with teams around the world working on documentation, development, branding, security, infrastructure, and more, has been one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences we’ve ever been a part of.

We have two sponsor/partner updates that we’re very excited to announce:

Google has signed on as a Principal Sponsor of the RESF! As such, Google understands the importance of Rocky Linux as a free, open, community enterprise operating system. Providing resources for testing and validation, their sponsorship ensures Rocky’s status as a first-class citizen on the Google Cloud Platform from day one, with supported images immediately available for launch.

Additionally, Microsoft has signed on as a Partner of the RESF! In their own words:

Linux is the fastest growing platform on Azure, running in over half of VM cores. For well over a decade, Microsoft has been investing in Linux, and with partnerships being a central pillar of Microsoft’s open source strategy we collaborate with RESF and the broader Rocky Linux ecosystem to ensure customers have an increasing set of options to deploy Linux workloads on Azure in a supported, managed and secure way.

Details on how to find and launch Rocky Linux on Azure will be soon forthcoming.

Team Updates

Leadership

We’ve received a few questions from the community about the structure of the RESF, and while this information has always been available on our website, we made updates for clarity. Summarized, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) formed in Delaware (file number 4429978), backed by a board of advisors with access control policies that utilize the principle of least privilege and separation of duty to ensure that no action can be taken unilaterally (not even by the legal owner, Gregory Kurtzer). For more information, see our Organizational Structure.

Documentation

We launched a more user friendly documentation website. It’s easier than ever to contribute now, and we’re always looking for new content. Anyone is free and welcome to contribute, so please reach out if you have an interest.

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Hello everyone. I am pleased to announce the general availability of Rocky Linux 8.5. This release is for the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures and is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5.

Please read through the release notes at: https://docs.rockylinux.org/release_notes/8.5/ - These notes contain important information about the release, details about some of the content inside the release (such as newer modules or updates throughout the distribution).

Secure Boot

x86_64

Secure boot is now officially supported starting with Rocky Linux 8.5.

Rescue Kernel

If you are updating from an 8.4 machine running on UEFI and you enable secure boot, the rescue kernel will no longer work. You will need to regenerate the necessary components.

If you updated to 8.5 and rebooted into the latest kernel, run the following:

% rm /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-* /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-*.img
% /usr/lib/kernel/install.d/51-dracut-rescue.install add $(uname -r) \
% rm /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-* /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-*.img
% /usr/lib/kernel/install.d/51-dracut-rescue.install add $(uname -r) \
  "" /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/vmlinuz

  "" /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/vmlinuz

It may be possible to remove the rescue files like above and run a dnf update to regenerate the kernel and initramfs in a single step.

EFI MOKvar

You may also see a mokvar message in dmesg: EFI MOKvar config table is not in EFI runtime memory - We determined that this does not affect the functionality of secure boot and this message can be safely ignored. We will be looking into this in a future update of packages surrounding secure boot.

AARCH64

At this time we do not have a signing system for this architecture. More information will be available soon.

Known Issues

.NET

During 8.3 and 8.4, our dotnet packages had stated the RID as rocky. For now, most dotnet packages will state “rhel” as the RID. This is temporary until we work out the plan to become part of the .NET ecosystem like our upstreams RHEL and Fedora. Please join us in ~Development on our mattermost or #rockylinux-devel if you would like to help us with this effort.

Updates

Updates released since upstream are posted across our current architectures. We strongly recommend that all users apply all updates, including the content released today on your existing Rocky Linux machines. This can be done by running dnf update.

All Rocky Linux components are built from the sources hosted at git.rockylinux.org. In addition, SRPMs are being published alongside the repositories in a corresponding “source” directory. You can find these on any of our mirrors. These source packages match every binary RPM we release.

Note that this release supersedes all previously released content for Rocky Linux 8. You are encouraged to update your system. Older content, such as those obsoleted from the previous release will not be available. While we keep older content around for historical purposes, it is recommended that you use the latest updates available to you.

Download

Rocky Linux can be downloaded in different ways. There are ISO images as well as torrents available.

Standard Downloads

Live Images (x86_64 only)

KDE live image is not available. The KDE packages in EPEL rely on an older version of Qt5. 8.5 rebased the base Qt5 packages to 5.15. A KDE live image will be released upon a KDE rebuild in EPEL.

Additional Images

Getting Help / Engaging with the Community

The Rocky Linux ecosystem is sustained by community-driven help, guidance, and love of RPM distributions, Enterprise Linux and its ecosystem. The best place to start for new users is at https://docs.rockylinux.org.

You can communicate with us and other community members on various mediums:

Mattermost: https://chat.rockylinux.org Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/rockylinux Forums: https://forums.rockylinux.org Mail list: https://lists.resf.org Libera IRC: #rockylinux

Bug Tracker: https://bugs.rockylinux.org

Thank you, and enjoy the release!

Louis Abel
Release Engineering

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year since the Rocky Linux project began! We’re hosting an informal online party to mark the occasion. Come celebrate with us!

Event Details

Topic: Rocky Linux 1 Year Anniversary Party 🥳

Time: Dec 11, 2021 15:00 to 19:00 PST (UTC-8)

Location: Online

POC: Brian Clemens <brian@resf.org>

Schedule

This is a casual event, there is no defined schedule. Just drop in and enjoy the party!