Summary

After seven months of long, hard work, we are beyond excited to announce that Rocky Linux 8.4 has reached General Availability for x86_64 and aarch64! We made fantastic progress with our release candidates and are happy to recommend this version for installation on your production systems. A migration tool is available in our GitHub repository, and release notes are available on our new documentation site.

Within 72 hours of launch, Rocky’s assets have been downloaded nearly 70,000 times from our Tier0 mirror, served from Fastly--not counting the number of downloads from our mirrors, of which we have nearly 100--and we count approximately 10,000 downloads of our torrent file.

To say that Rocky Linux 8.4 is popular would be an understatement.

You, the community, made this happen. We can’t begin to express our gratitude for your support. Watching the community grow from a comment in a blog post in December to what it is today, with teams around the world working on documentation, development, branding, security, infrastructure, and more, has been one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences we’ve ever been a part of.

We have two sponsor/partner updates that we’re very excited to announce:

Google has signed on as a Principal Sponsor of the RESF! As such, Google understands the importance of Rocky Linux as a free, open, community enterprise operating system. Providing resources for testing and validation, their sponsorship ensures Rocky’s status as a first-class citizen on the Google Cloud Platform from day one, with supported images immediately available for launch.

Additionally, Microsoft has signed on as a Partner of the RESF! In their own words:

Linux is the fastest growing platform on Azure, running in over half of VM cores. For well over a decade, Microsoft has been investing in Linux, and with partnerships being a central pillar of Microsoft’s open source strategy we collaborate with RESF and the broader Rocky Linux ecosystem to ensure customers have an increasing set of options to deploy Linux workloads on Azure in a supported, managed and secure way.

Details on how to find and launch Rocky Linux on Azure will be soon forthcoming.

Team Updates

Leadership

We’ve received a few questions from the community about the structure of the RESF, and while this information has always been available on our website, we made updates for clarity. Summarized, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) formed in Delaware (file number 4429978), backed by a board of advisors with access control policies that utilize the principle of least privilege and separation of duty to ensure that no action can be taken unilaterally (not even by the legal owner, Gregory Kurtzer). For more information, see our Organizational Structure.

Documentation

We launched a more user friendly documentation website. It’s easier than ever to contribute now, and we’re always looking for new content. Anyone is free and welcome to contribute, so please reach out if you have an interest.

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If you have any comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, or would like to help out, send a note to hello@rockylinux.org.

Sincerely,
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation
https://rockylinux.org