Rocky Linux 9.3 Has Been Released
We are very excited that the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) has released Rocky Linux 9.3 for the x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures! As the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux, we’d like to express our appreciation to our team as well as the entire developer community for all their hard work on this release.
You can now download Rocky Linux 9.3 for x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures from the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation website. Before getting started, you’ll want to review the release notes in the Rocky Linux documentation, which includes important information about known bugs and changes.
Notable new features and changes
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The 9.3 release brings back cloud and container images for ppc64le that were not released with 9.2 due to issues with QEMU. These images may be divergent from the other architecture’s images in some small ways, but the RESF will work to reduce this delta in future releases of the images.
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The kernel-rt package has been merged into a subpackage of kernel.
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A new kernel-uki package was introduced as a Technology Preview, providing a Unified Kernel Image variant for booting. This UKI image is signed with its own SecureBoot key.
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java-21-openjdk was introduced, providing a new version of Java.
Breaking Changes
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Azure images for Rocky Linux 9.3 will be published under a new publisher name: resf, instead of the previous long, unreadable name. These images are not published yet, but should be available by the end of the week and will be accompanied by another news post.
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The optional guest-agents group, previously available within both the Minimal Install and Custom Operating System base environments in anaconda, is no-longer available for selection as additional software for those environments. Consult release notes for more details.
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The KDE live image for Rocky Linux 9.3 had problems during the testing phase. For this, we will be providing the older 9.2 images until we can build and provide a working image.
Special Interest Group (SIG) notes
- AMI images now set the boot-mode parameter to uefi-preferred: https://bugs.rockylinux.org/view.php?id=4390
Testing
Rocky Linux releases go through thorough testing to ensure correctness and stability. Testing consists of hundreds of manual and automated checks covering all manner of environments and configurations.
Rocky Linux 9.3 was subjected to a week of testing before receiving the team’s approval. Testing logs, discussion, and the release checklist can be viewed here.
Upgrade and Conversions
Current users of Rocky Linux 9 can upgrade to 9.3 from the terminal via dnf update, or from the desktop with GNOME Software, KDE Discover, etc.
Users of other Enterprise Linux 9 distributions can upgrade and convert to Rocky Linux 9.3 via the migrate2rocky conversion script.
For a more complete list of new features and changes, check out the Rocky Linux 9.3 Release Notes.
We are thankful to 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.rockylinux.org. Other ways to participate include the forums, IRC on Libera.Chat, Reddit, and RESF mailing lists.
