Rocky Linux 8.8 Has Been Released

As the founding support and services sponsor and partner for Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), we are excited to join the Rocky community in announcing the release of Rocky Linux 8.8 for the x86-64 and aarch64 architectures as well as the availability of professional support, services, and CIQ value adds like Mountain and Fuzzball for these updates! 

You can now download Rocky Linux and learn more from the official release announcement. Before you get started, please review the release notes in the Rocky Linux documentation for important information about known issues and comprehensive changes. 

Here’s an overview of what’s new in Rocky Linux 8.8!

Major changes

• The Container Universal Base Image rockylinux/rockylinux:8-ubi has been changed to be more similar to the RHEL UBI images:

  • Replaced packages: libcurl -> curl-minimal, libcurl-minimal

  • Added packages: gdb-gdbserver, gzip

  • Removed packages: binutils, brotli, dmidecode

  • network config cleanup added

• Microsoft Azure images are now published in the Shared Galleries, providing a direct way to consume Rocky Linux images without subscribing to the image via the marketplace

• LVM cloud image variants now remove /etc/lvm/devices/system.devices to resolve issues with PV/VG/LVs upon installation of the images due to being hardcoded to a specific device

Notable new features and changes

• Intel Arc GPU support has been added

• Git has been updated to 2.39.1, enabling support of commit signing with SSH keys

• FIPS mode settings in the kernel have been adjusted to conform to the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3

• Podman’s Quadlet feature is now available

Upgrades and conversions

Current users of Rocky Linux 8 can upgrade to 8.8 from the terminal via dnf update, or from the desktop with GNOME Software, KDE Discover, etc. 

Users of other Enterprise Linux 8 distributions can upgrade and convert to Rocky Linux 8.8 via the migrate2rocky conversion script.

Testing

As with all our releases, Rocky Linux 8.8 was developed by the community, for the community, and went through extensive testing to ensure stability. This testing involved hundreds of manual and automated checks in a full range of environments and configurations. 

We would like to thank all of the Rocky Linux project volunteers and leads for their efforts in producing, testing, and documenting this release! If you’re interested in the process or want to help, join the team on chat.rocky.linux.org or participate via the forums, IRC on Libera.Chat, Reddit, and RESF mailing lists.