Community Update: 9.5 Release Coming Soon, RISC-V, More | November 2024

9.5 Release Underway

It’s that time again! The Rocky Linux team is working through the Release Playbook for Version 9.5. Official release and notes expected as soon as all images pass testing procedures. This is a great time to connect with the Testing Team at chat.rockylinux.org and see how you can help.

RISC-V Collaboration

While the rest of the community waits, we have a major lookahead announcement to share with you about something we’ve been working on since August with RESF Partner RISC-V International. Are you ready?

The AltArch SIG will support a RISC-V port in the upcoming release of Rocky Linux 10 (which we began working on in February). RISC-V is an innovative open source instruction set architecture (ISA). The organization is currently working with industry leaders in a coalition called RISE to accelerate the development of open source software for this architecture. This is an exciting development in open source architectures, and we are really pleased to partner with RISC-V International and the RISE Project in making this architecture accessible to the world.

To be part of this effort, join Mattermost, find channel SIG/AltArch, and join the conversation. Regular meetings happen fortnightly on Fridays at 16:00 UTC, with the next one coming up this week, November 15. Special thanks to Release Engineering lead Louis Abel for spearheading the RISC-V Bootstrap for the SIG.

Elsewhere in the Project

In addition to the current release cycle and the RISC-V project, fresh ideas continue to drive progress in the Rocky Linux Project.

Documentation

The Documentation Team recently held a special initiative, Rocky Summer of Docs (RSOD) to grow our contributorship and populate a new category of documentation for Desktop and Gaming. In October they participated in another initiative, Hacktoberfest, which brought in more new contributors through GitHub and helped us add some additional tutorials. Thanks to everyone who participated in both events!

Community

The Community Team has been busy traveling around the US and internationally in 2024 to meet Rocky Linux users and answer questions about how our Project is organized and how we are planning for the future. We connected with the GNOME community at GUADEC in Denver, CO, USA; our upstream Fedora community at Flock to Fedora in Rochester, NY, USA; the Latin American Science & Technology community at Nerdearla in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and what felt like the heart of the Open Source community at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC, USA.

OLF Conference (Columbus, Ohio, USA)

This weekend, Rocky Linux will be at Ohio Linux Fest. Two of our community members, Maxine Hayes and Anthony Navarro, will be speakers! Be sure to stop by the Rocky Linux table for stickers and tees.

SuperComputing ‘24 (Atlanta, GA, USA)

Rocky Linux is a favorite OS choice in the HPC community! Will you be at SC24 in Atlanta next week, November 18-22? Look for Rocky Linux community members sharing space at booth #4131, co-located with Founding RESF Sponsor CIQ. If your enterprise runs on Rocky Linux, community representatives would love to connect, create a profile of your use-case, and discuss collaboration opportunities.

We love our Community, Sponsors, and Partners

With the Rocky Linux annual report and biennial RESF Board elections coming up in the next 60 days, you can expect more information soon on the State of the Project and 2025 Roadmaps for the Rocky Linux teams and SIGs. As always, we appreciate the support of our community, sponsors, and partners.

For further inquiries, please reach out to hello@rockylinux.org.