AlmaLinux 9.6 Stable Now Available
Hello Community! The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is announcing the general availability of AlmaLinux OS 9.6 codenamed “Sage Margay”!
Installation ISOs are available on the mirrors now for all 4 architectures:
Torrents are available as well at:
ISOs, Live Images, Cloud and Containers
AlmaLinux also offers a variety of Cloud, Container and Live Images. The builds for these get kicked off as soon as the public repository is ready.
The following images are expected to be available shortly.
- Container images including Platform and UBIs alternatives. We provide a wide variety of containers for your use.
- LXC/LXD
- Live Media for GNOME, GNOME-mini, KDE, XFCE, MATE and more.
- Cloud Images
- AWS for x86_64 and AArch64 EC2 Instances
- Azure for x86_64 and AArch64 VMs
- Google Cloud
- Generic Cloud/Cloud-init for all 4 architectures
- OpenNebula for x86_64 and AArch64 architectures
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for x86_64 and AArch64 Instances
- Vagrant Boxes:
- Libvirt
- VirtualBox
- Hyper-V
- VMWare for x86_64 and AArch64
- Parallels for AArch64
- Raspberry Pi
- Windows Subsystem for Linux for x86_64 and AArch64
Release Notes and More Information
AlmaLinux 9.6 Stable continues to enhance performance, development tools, and security. Updated module streams improve support for web applications, while new compiler versions bring optimizations for better performance. The release also delivers updates to elfutils, Valgrind, SystemTap, and PCP improving system debugging and performance monitoring. Networking improvements come with new versions of NetworkManager and iproute. Security updates include new SELinux-policy and SSSD versions. Containerization and virtualization are improved with updated podman, buildah, libvirt, and QEMU-KVM. Additionally, the new snpguest and snphost packages enhance virtualization capabilities.
AlmaLinux OS 9.6 also includes a tech-preview of KVM virtualization support for the IBM Power architecture. It has been unavailable upstream since version 9.0, but is fundamental for a number of AlmaLinux users. That list includes the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, who submitted the RFC to the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee for consideration in February.
You can read the full release notes for this version on the wiki: AlmaLinux OS 9.6 Release Notes.
What can you do to help?
Your input into testing and feedback is crucial and essential for successful production releases. Please, report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker. Also, pop into the AlmaLinux Community Chat and join our Testing Channel, post a question on our 9.6 Forum, on our AlmaLinux Community on Reddit or catch us on X.
Please report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker.
Enjoy the release and have fun!
