CIQ launches RLC Pro: redefining the Enterprise Linux standard

RLC Pro unifies open source availability and enterprise capabilities in one solution, eliminating infrastructure fragmentation. A foundation built for modern infrastructure, with variants purpose-built for security and AI.

The commercial model for Enterprise Linux has stayed largely the same for decades; you pay for a subscription to get access to open source and freely available software. But the vendor’s revenue model prohibits using your subscription everywhere, so you’re limited to just a small portion of the infrastructure leading to a bisected and disjointed operating system environment. While this is a benefit for your vendor, it is surely a hardship for you, and it is a legacy, proprietary software business model.

Since 2021, CIQ has been the founding commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux, and Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro (RLC Pro) is a complete rethinking of what an Enterprise Linux vendor owes its customers and the community. We have built a team consisting of industry and engineering experts, and customer supporting roles across the entire operating system to take the baseline Rocky Linux and provide the capabilities that organizations require for compliance and governance. And, we want you to run it everywhere.

With RLC Pro, we provide direct bug fixes, committed CVE timelines, LTS and extended life to ease transitions between point releases, and FIPS 140-3, as an all-inclusive subscription, with no inventory tracking. You get a vendor who stands behind your infrastructure.

Built on that foundation, RLC Pro's purpose-built variant family extends the standard for enhanced security and turn-key AI performance.

This is our vision of what a customer-first modern Enterprise Linux ecosystem should be. RLC Pro, and its suite of products, is built upon a clear principle: organizations should be able to choose the right tier for their needs, and scale it everywhere.

Whether your workload is for enterprise production, regulated environments, or AI infrastructure, CIQ has your back.

Learn more about RLC Pro →

RLC Pro: CIQ’s view of what Enterprise Linux should be

Rocky Linux has tens of millions of actively deployed instances worldwide. It powers production workloads across various industries - financial services, healthcare, government agencies, research, and technology. That adoption happened because the community prioritized stability and transparency from day one.

Community Rocky Linux is excellent, and for many workloads and many organizations, community Rocky Linux is exactly the right choice.

But some organizations operate under constraints that community distributions aren't designed to address. Regulated industries need FIPS-validated cryptographic modules. Security teams need a vendor who will commit to CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) remediation timelines. Legal departments need IP indemnification. Production environments running certified application stacks need pinned LTS versions that stay supported for years, not months. And operations teams need a vendor who will confirm when something is wrong, own the fix, and ship it. We are their partner to help remediate those issues: from fixing bugs and driving enhancements to supporting integration. When it matters most, CIQ shows up.

Those requirements reflect enterprise priorities that sit outside the scope of any typical community managed project. RLC Pro exists for the organizations that carry those obligations.

RLC Pro checks every enterprise box that our customers require: binary compatibility, security, update SLAs, FIPS validation, indemnification, and support. CIQ treats these capabilities as the baseline. RLC Pro is built for production workloads, engineered with kernels tuned and designed for the workloads enterprises actually run, and delivers the security posture and stability that modern infrastructure demands.

Every feature below is included in the base RLC Pro subscription.

• Direct bug fixes. RLC Pro frees internal engineers to build rather than fix. When a bug affects RLC Pro customers, CIQ's engineering team can fix it and ship the patch directly. We do not need to wait for upstream patches or community Rocky Linux rebuilds. If you hit a bug, it can get fixed.
• Long-Term Support, bundled as standard. Every RLC Pro subscription includes Long-Term Support. Extended support covers all even-numbered minor versions with up to 4 years of continued security patching. Platform teams can plan on 3–5 year infrastructure horizons without forced point-release upgrades. You upgrade when your internal roadmap says to, not when the upstream release calendar demands it.
• FIPS 140-3 comes standard. NIST-certified cryptographic modules are available on LTS .2/.6/.10 minor versions. Government, defense, financial services and healthcare organizations can achieve FIPS-validated environments with confidence.
• CVE remediation with committed timelines. Commercial SLAs and SLOs for Critical and High impact vulnerabilities affecting priority packages.
• Full Enterprise Linux binary compatibility. Existing applications, deployment scripts, automation playbooks, and ISV certifications, all carry over and function exactly as you’d expect.
• Indemnification and enterprise support. Legal protection against third-party IP claims.
• Professional support and services. Enterprise support from a team invested in your success.
• Turn-key, ready to go. Each solution is built to accelerate time to value with pre-integrated drivers for many of the most commonly used hardware integrations.

Evaluating RLC Pro for production workloads? Learn more

RLC +: Free ecosystem integrations. RLC + is based on the stable Rocky Linux distribution organizations have come to trust, now including the complete NVIDIA AI and networking stack validated, tested, and ready out-of-the-box. The NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and DOCA OFED are pre-integrated into RLC + and freely available, with additional hardware partners to come.

What this means in practice: GPU-accelerated workloads, AI training, HPC simulation, and data analytics have historically required hours of driver compatibility work and toolkit integration before a single job runs. RLC + eliminates that friction entirely. Download, deploy, and your NVIDIA hardware works. RLC + is the right choice for GPU workloads, cloud and hybrid environments, development environments, and evaluation. When your requirements extend to Long-Term Support, FIPS validation, production SLOs, and indemnification, that's where RLC Pro begins.

RLC Pro variants: a stable foundation for specialized workloads

RLC Pro is the foundation for a family of purpose-built variants and the architecture that makes it possible to deliver specialized capabilities without fragmenting the enterprise foundation organizations depend on. Each variant ships as a complete, production-ready distribution built on the full RLC Pro base. What changes is what's built on top.

This is what eliminating infrastructure fragmentation looks like in practice. One vendor, one support relationship, one commercial foundation that runs consistently from development through production, whether the workload demands a hardened security posture, GPU-accelerated AI, or general enterprise stability. RLC +, RLC Pro, and its variants are designed to cover the full range without forcing organizations to stitch together separate OS strategies for separate environments. You choose the tier that fits the workload. CIQ stands behind all of it.

RLC Pro Hardened: proactive security hardening and automated compliance

Security and compliance are not the same problem, but regulated enterprises are expected to solve both. Compliance frameworks like DISA STIG and CIS benchmarks define a security baseline, but achieving that baseline manually takes hours per system and drifts the moment application teams start making changes. And even a fully compliant system leaves security teams in a reactive posture while the exploitation window is wide open. Teams are left waiting for a CVE to be disclosed, waiting for a patch to be released, and waiting for a maintenance window to safely deploy it. In 2018, attackers needed 63 days to exploit a newly discovered vulnerability. By 2023, that window had collapsed to 5 days.

RLC Pro Hardened solves both. It ships 95% DISA STIG and 99% CIS compliant at first boot, no manual configuration, no quarterly scramble when standards update. And it embeds active defense directly into the OS with runtime protections that detect and disrupt exploitation attempts whether a patch exists or not, closing the window that compliance frameworks alone leave open.

What's built in:

• Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG): Real-time kernel integrity monitoring that detects exploitation as attempts occur, not after.
• Hardened memory allocator (hardened_malloc): Defends against heap exploitation techniques.
• Hardened core packages: OpenSSH attack surface reduced. Hardened glibc. Stronger password policies via passwdqc and GPU-resistant hashing with yescrypt.
• 95% DISA STIG and 99% CIS compliance, out of the box: Pre-hardened images eliminate the manual configuration work that needs to be redone every time DISA releases quarterly STIG updates.
• Cryptographically signed packages and SBOM per image: Full supply chain verification from CIQ repositories to deployment.
• Protected on day-one: Mitigates entire classes of vulnerabilities, before they are known or disclosed.

Security teams stop firefighting baseline maintenance and start focusing on strategic problems. Compliance teams stop scrambling for audit evidence. Platform teams stop treating security and operations as competing priorities.

Learn more about RLC Pro Hardened →

RLC Pro AI: the OS layer optimized for AI infrastructure

CIQ believes your infrastructure should be designed around your workloads, not the other way around. RLC Pro AI starts from that premise. Every kernel parameter, every framework configuration, every component in the stack is chosen specifically to maximize AI output per dollar of infrastructure investment.

Some organizations need more from their GPU infrastructure than a general-purpose OS can deliver. Teams running inference at scale, startups building on proven AI infrastructure, and developers who need something production-ready without months of kernel tuning are the organizations RLC Pro AI was built for.

The core value proposition is simple: more tokens, at scale, less risk.

Hardware resources are always finite. Demand for compute outpaces GPU availability. The organizations that win aren't the ones who buy the most GPUs, they're the ones who get the most out of the ones they have. RLC Pro AI is optimized to help you get the most out of these expensive hardware investments by de-risking the investment, knowing that everything will just work, optimizing token output and delivery with enhancements down to the kernel, and including optimized versions of the middleware, tools, and frameworks you need. That means more tokens per GPU-hour. Infrastructure economics that improve with scale.

The vision behind RLC Pro AI is that it is built with an AI-first mindset from the kernel layer to the rest of the OS. It's cohesive. Every component validated together, nothing DIY, nothing that breaks on the next update.

RLC Pro AI is in tech preview and general availability is coming soon. With the GA release, CIQ will share the full story: the infrastructure economics and the vision for an AI-first operating system. Join the early access RLC Pro AI tech preview program →

Enterprise Linux has been overdue for a rethink

The legacy model was designed around vendor revenue, not customer outcomes. RLC Pro is designed the other way around. Every product in the RLC Pro family is built on the same commitment: one vendor, one commercial foundation, running consistently across every environment you operate. Development, production, regulated, GPU-accelerated; you shouldn't need a different OS strategy for each.

Rocky Linux has earned the trust of millions of deployments worldwide. RLC Pro is how CIQ earns yours.

To learn more about RLC Pro and CIQ's complete Enterprise Linux portfolio, join Brady Dibble, Director of Product Management, for the upcoming webinar "RLC Pro: Redefining what Enterprise Linux should be," on Thursday, March 12, 2026 at 11am PT / 2pm ET.

Evaluating options? Talk to a CIQ expert to find your starting point.