With the ending of CentOS 8, Long term support branch by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has spurted the increase in the appearance of other clones such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and VzLinux. And recently, Rocky Linux has also released its stable latest version i.e 8.4 in parallel to RHEL.
Rocky Linux is also an RHEL clone that came into the Linux world right after Red Hat decided to end CentOS Long term support. The project meant to target enterprises to replace CentOS, the interesting thing is the Rocky Linux is the idea of Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of CentOS.
RHEL clones generally try to stay close to their parent distribution, so as with AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux, their version is already 8.4 (although VzLinux has remained at version 8.3). However, after few months finally, the Rocky Linux officials say it is “a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. ”
When it comes to what’s new, Rocky Linux 8.4 follows in the footsteps of its upstream Linux (Redhat) and comes with Python 3.9, GCC 10, Rust 1.49, LLVM 11, Go 1.15.7, SWIG 4.0, and Subversion 1.14 for programming and Redis 6 topics. , PostgreSQL 13 and MariaDB 10.5 as database technologies.
At the security level, the main changes have been the IPsec VPN provided by Libreswan now supports TCP encapsulation and the security labels for IKEv2, that the ‘scap-security-guide’ packages have been modified to version 0.1.54.
Since OpenSCAP has been modified to version 1.3.4, the ‘fapolicyd’ framework now provides integrity checking, and the RPM plugin logs any system updates that are handled by the YUM package manager or the RPM package manager.
Regarding network support, the ‘nmstate’ API is fully supported by Rocky Linux 8.4, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for forwarding data in the kernel and routing the flow of traffic through business networks and new traffic control actions in ‘iproute2’.
For the kernel, proactive compaction periodically starts the memory compaction job before an allocation request is made, a new implementation of the memory block handler for control group technology, the namespace function of time for the change of the date and time in the containers, and the support of the Error Correction and Detection (EDAC) module.
Finally, 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, as well as a module for Ansible for location management.
All the details of Rocky Linux 8.4 can be found in the official announcement and release notes. If you want to Migrate from your existing CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8, then follow our tutorial- How to Migrate From CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8
