Today, AlmaLinux OS Foundation announces the much-anticipated arrival of AlmaLinux 9.4, codenamed “Seafoam Ocelot.” One thing can’t be denied: Alma is a champion of rolling out their releases quickly right after RHEL’s main one; in this case, the gap is four days.
For this edition, AlmaLinux stands out by closely mirroring release and software versions with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by leveraging the same sources as RHEL, ensuring (almost) complete compatibility.
Why do we say almost? Well, because they announced in the middle of last year in the blog post titled “The Future of AlmaLinux is Bright,” amidst the drama of Red Hat restricting access to its source code, that from now on, they will stick to ABI (Application Binary Interface) compatibility with RHEL only.
In addition, they introduced two new repositories (an idea we really like), Testing and Synergy, that you won’t find in the original RHEL releases, which can make things a bit tricky if you use the software provided in them and then decide to migrate to RHEL.
But what really caught our attention was a particular line from the official release announcement: “This makes it (Alma, ed.) the only option for those seeking a genuinely open-source Enterprise Linux.” Okay, it’s quite a bold statement that we find hard to agree with, but that is for another conversation. Now, back to the topic.
AlmaLinux 9.4 Highlights
AlmaLinux 9.4 introduces a host of updates aimed at fortifying machine security, streamlining data protection, and enhancing system reliability.
Noteworthy enhancements include improvements in web-console functionality, streamlined system roles for automated operations, and bolstered virtual machine snapshot capabilities, which are particularly valuable in hybrid cloud setups.
Additionally, the release brings about performance optimizations, scalability improvements, and reliability enhancements, empowering developers in application development and management, including version updates of many software tools, such as Python 3.12, Ruby 3.3, PHP 8.2, Go 1.21, Rust 1.75, LLVM 17, MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 16, and others.
The thing we much liked in this release is that in a nod to community feedback, AlmaLinux 9.4 revitalizes support for deprecated hardware with a list of re-added PCI IDs for legacy hardware, including:
- aacraid – Dell PERC2, 2/Si, 3/Si, 3/Di, Adaptec Advanced Raid Products, HP NetRAID-4M, IBM ServeRAID & ICP SCSI
- be2iscsi – Emulex OneConnectOpen-iSCSI for BladeEngine 2 and 3 adapters
- hpsa – HP Smart Array Controller
- lpfc – Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel SCSI
- megaraid_sas – Broadcom MegaRAID SAS
- mlx4_core – Mellanox Gen2 and ConnectX-2 adapters
- mpt3sas – LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0
- mptsas – Fusion MPT SAS Host
- qla2xxx – QLogic Fibre Channel HBA
- qla4xxx – QLogic iSCSI HBA
The other things closely align with what’s offered in the RHEL 9.4 release, which is detailed in our article on the topic.
AlmaLinux 9.4 is available for four architectures: Intel/AMD (x86_64), ARM64 (aarch64), IBM PowerPC (ppc64le), and IBM Z (s390x). You can download the installation ISO images from public mirrors.
Last but not least, if you are currently running AlmaLinux 9.x, everything you need to upgrade to the latest 9.4 release is to run the following DNF command in the terminal:
sudo dnf upgrade -yYou can refer to the release announcement or visit this for more information about all changes.
