Rocky Linux is aLinux distribution developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is a privately ownedbenefit corporation that describes itself as a "self-imposed not-for-profit".[4] It is intended to be adownstream, completebinary-compatible release using theRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system source code.[5] The project's aim is to provide a community-supported,production-grade enterprise operating system. Rocky Linux, along with RHEL andSUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), has become popular for enterprise operating system use.[6][7]
The firstrelease candidate version of Rocky Linux was released on April 30, 2021, and its firstgeneral availability version was released on June 21, 2021. Rocky Linux 8 will be supported through May 2029[8] and Rocky Linux 9 through May 2032.[9]
On December 8, 2020,Red Hat announced that they would discontinue development ofCentOS, which had been a production-ready downstream version of RHEL, in favor of a newer upstream development variant of that operating system known asCentOS Stream.[10] In response, Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ[11] (a Rocky Linux support provider) and one of the original founders of CentOS, announced that he would start a new project to achieve the original goals of CentOS.[12][13][14] Its name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh.[5] By December 12, thecode repository[15] of Rocky Linux had become the top-trending repository onGitHub.[16]
On December 22, 2020, Rocky Linux community manager Jordan Pisaniello announced that the target for an initial release was anywhere between March and May of 2021.[17] On January 20, 2021, it was announced that a test repository would be made available to the public by the end of February, and a release candidate was on target for the end of March 2021.[18] However, that date was slightly pushed back,[19] and on April 30, 2021, the first release candidate was officially released.[20] The second release candidate, of version 8.4, the last before the stable release, was released on June 4, 2021.[21] The high version number is based on the designation of RHEL. Rocky Linux is a clone of RHEL, which is also binary-compatible and is already supported by numerous large, financially strong sponsors.[22] On June 21, 2021, the stable release of Rocky Linux 8.4 was released,[23] with the code name "Green Obsidian".[24]
Rocky Linux 9.0 was released on July 14, 2022, alongside a newreproducible build system called "Peridot", created to ensure the community can easily create new RHEL forks if Rocky Linux ever were to be discontinued, and to allow the Rocky Linux project to make new releases faster.[25][26] Rocky Linux 9.0 is also the first version to supportlittle-endianPowerPC processors andIBM Z (s390x) mainframes.[3]
Some of theISO images released by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation have no direct upstream equivalents. They are created for specific purposes, such as for providing a live bootable image, or for providing a reduced-size installation medium.[27]
