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VOOZH | about |
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Are you a developer or a power user of AlmaLinux? The hard-working volunteers behind the project have set up a dedicated early release of the next version of AlmaLinux (v10, due next year) for testing and for the curious, called Kitten.
Spawned by Red Hat‘s 2020 cancellation of CentOS (in its legacy non-streaming form), AlmaLinux is built directly from the open source code that IBM’s Red Hat uses for its own flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.
The project has always maintained full compatibility with RHEL, but has made its own non-breaking tweaks along the way (As dutifully captured in each release’s notes). The build process has grown complex enough that the dev team, and concerned onlookers, could use an upstream candidate to fiddle with, explained AlmaLinux Board Chair benny Vasquez in an interview with TNS.
Like other early builds, AlmaLinux Kitten will be updated frequently, and images will be rebuilt every three months. And since each new version is named after a cat (“Turquoise Kodkod,” “Lime Lynx”) it makes sense to label the early builds as “Kitten.”
Each new build of AlmaLinux is shaped from CentOS Stream, which is also what Red Hat itself uses as the base for the next RHEL candidate. This does not mean AlmaLinux is a version of CentOS Stream itself. But CentOS Stream 10 will be the base for RHEL10 which will, in turn, be mirrored for AlmaLinux 10, due early next year (Note: Red Hat has nothing to do with AlmaLinux).
Earlier this year, the dev team found it necessary to set up a build pipeline for AlmaLinux after Red Hat announced it would discontinue releasing traditional betas for minor versions of RHEL.
“We’re still matching Red Hat in our build process and like the patches that they pull in that kind of stuff, but we’re pulling it from the same source that they do now, instead of from Red Hat directly, because they made it clear that’s not what they wanted,” Vasquez said.
Kitten is not a fully mature Linux release itself (though it probably could be used that way in a pinch, Vasquez noted).
Instead, the advantage that this new early release brings is that users or projects that build on AlmaLinux can get an earlier glimpse of the next release.
For instance, Cybertrust Japan builds its own distro Miracle Linux, from AlmaLinux (in much the same way that Ubuntu builds from Debian). They can start making plans and testing much earlier in their own cycle using this Kitten.
Cisco also uses Alma for its Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).
It’s also worth noting that AlmaLinux, as it continues on its own journey, will start to subtly start to differ from RHEL — though remain compatible with RHEL should anyone need to switch from one platform to the other.
This is natural, given that AlmaLinux is seeking a wider, more diverse user base than the enterprise-focused RHEL, Vasquez said.
Overall, AlmaLinux has added support back in for over 150 device drivers that were dropped upstream in RHEL.
And more support is coming for AlmaLinux 10: RHEL recently disabled frame pointers by default, but AlmaLinux is re-enabling them.
RHEL dropped support for version 2 of Intel’s x86-64 CPU feature sets (rebasing RHEL on v3 of the chipset); while Alma will continue to support v2, which means this distro will continue to support older Intel-based servers long after Red Hat has moved on.
Support for the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) — which RHEL disregarded back in 9.0 — is also being added back in, as is KVM for IBM POWER.
