May 16, 2022Rocky Linux 8.6 Available Now

Share:

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Rocky Linux 8.6. This release is available for the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures. Release notes are available in the Rocky Linux Documentation - These notes contain important information including known bugs and more comprehensive details about changes in this version.

Highlights

Support for newer versions of language runtimes

  • PHP 8.0 provides bug fixes and enhancements, namely to the use of structured metadata syntax, newly named arguments that are order-independent, and improved performance for Just-In-Time compilation.
  • Perl 5.32 provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements, including support for Unicode version 13, a new experimental infix operator, and faster feature checks.

New system roles

  • High availability (HA) cluster system role: This role helps create and manage secure, stable HA clusters. It also enables better control when managing multiple clusters.
  • Enhanced network system role: This role helps users create secure connections (including over Wi-Fi) along with robust firewall rules.
  • WebConsole role: This role automates the installation and configuration of the Rocky Linux web console, including installing the web console package, starting and enabling the web console, and configuring its settings.

Miscellaneous

  • Stratis Storage support in the web console

Upgrading to Rocky Linux 8.6

Current users of Rocky Linux 8 can upgrade to 8.6 by typing:

dnf update

Users of other Enterprise Linux 8 distributions can upgrade to Rocky Linux 8.6 via the migrate2rocky conversion script.

Thanks

We are grateful to the many Rocky Linux project volunteers and leaders for producing, testing, and documenting this release, as well as our Sponsors and Partners who provide the resources to build, test, and produce Rocky.

The Release Engineering and Testing teams bear the brunt of the workload for new releases, and in particular for the release of Rocky Linux 8.6:

  • Al Bowles
  • Chris Stackpole
  • Louis Abel
  • Lukas Magauer
  • Mustafa Gezen
  • Neil Hanlon
  • Scott Shinn
  • Sherif Nagy
  • Skip Grube
  • Steven Spencer
  • Taylor Goodwill
  • Trevor Cooper

We are thankful for the development work in Fedora Linux, the curation efforts in CentOS Stream, and the countless developers and their projects from which these distributions are built.