Rocky Linux 8.6 Has Been Released

May 19, 2022

CIQ is the official founding support and services partner for the Rocky Linux project, and we are excited to announce the release of Rocky Linux 8.6. We are thankful to the entire Rocky Linux Community for helping to bring this release to fruition.

Rocky Linux 8.6 can be downloaded for various architectures from the project website here:

https://rockylinux.org/download/

Major Changes

Rocky Linux 8.6 features major changes listed in the following sections in the Security, Programming, Identity Management, Infrastructure and Development tools categories.

For a complete list, please see the distribution release notes here as well as the upstream release notes here.

Security

fapolicyd: updated to version 1.1. Includes the ability to use /rules.d and /trust.d directories, the ability to use fagenrules script, and new options for the fapolicyd-clicommand.
OpenSSH server now supports drop in configurations. This means you can use the Include directive in sshd_config similar to what is now available for ssh_config.
pcsc-lite package: rebased to upstream version 1.9.5 with new enhancements and bug fixes.
SELinux: You can now verify versions of installed policy modules by using the --checksum option with the semodule command.
SCAP Security Guide (SSG) packages: rebased to version 0.1.60, and OpenSCAP packages have been rebased to version 1.3.6.

Web and Programming

New modules are available for:

PHP 8.0
Perl 5.32

Identity Management

ansible-freeipa roles and modules available in the Ansible Automation Hub.

Infrastructure Services

bind9.16 issued as an alternative to the regular bind packages with an enhanced feature set. For more on this see Infrastructure Services upstream.

Ansible

You can now install ansible-core from the Rocky Linux Appstream repository. The ansible-core package provides the ansible and ansible-playbook binaries as well as the core ansible modules. It deprecates the old ansible package that provides the same binaries. If you already have ansible installed, you will need to uninstall that to be able to install ansible-core.

This can be done with either of the commands below:

$ sudo dnf swap ansible ansible-core

$ sudo dnf  -y remove ansible ; sudo dnf -y install ansible-core

New Modules

The following modular packages are now available at the listed versions:

container-tools:4.0
eclipse:rhel8
log4j:2
perl:5.32
php:8.0

Compilers and Development Tools

The following compilers and development tools are now available at the listed versions in Rocky Linux 8.6:

GCC Toolset 11
LLVM Toolset 13.0.1
Rust Toolset 1.58.1
Go Toolset 1.17.7

For more information on the latest changes see the upstream listing here.

Upgrading From Rocky Linux 8.5

DNF’s upgrade option can be used to upgrade Rocky Linux 8.5 to Rocky Linux 8.6. The command is:

$ sudo dnf -y upgrade

Depending on how many packages you currently have installed, the upgrade might take anywhere from 10 minutes to 25 minutes to complete.

A full system reboot will be needed after the upgrade completes.

Known Issues

kdump: Currently, when using any interactive installation method, the kdump spoke must be entered last. This includes any plans for disk encryption. In these cases, if you have plans to turn off kdump, format the disk with encryption before turning it off.
minimal ISO: When doing an installation with the minimal ISO, be prepared to be missing packages, most notably from the AppStream repository (rsyslog, policycoreutils-python-utils, etc.). This is to be expected.
KDE and this kernel bug: If you are using KDE on 8.5 and upgrade to 8.6, it is highly likely that you will end up with issues. The referenced bug deals with the inability to unlock your screen after locking occurs. A workaround is to boot to the older kernel in GRUB on startup.

Do you need support for Rocky Linux? Here at CIQ, we prefer to support people, not sockets or cores. We have two main strategies that will enable your organization to achieve the outcomes that they are seeking.

We can align our teams:

By the Person (# of People engaging CIQ Solutions) Unlimited Servers, VMs, Containers & Cloud

By the Node or Instances (# of Servers or Instances, # People engaging CIQ Solutions) Includes VM’s, Containers & Cloud

For more information on our support services, email us at info@ciq.com.