Hello Community!
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is announcing the availability of AlmaLinux 9.6 Beta “Sage Margay” for all supported architectures:
- Intel/AMD (x86_64)
- ARM64 (aarch64)
- IBM PowerPC (ppc64le)
- IBM Z (s390x)
Beta ISOs are available at repo.almalinux.org.
A usual reminder: this is a BETA release. It should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don’t mind if something breaks. If you are looking to see how things going to work in stable, you are on the right track.
Release Notes and More Information
AlmaLinux 9.6 Beta 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.
You can read the full release notes for this version on the wiki: AlmaLinux OS 9.6 Beta Release Notes.
What you can 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, join us in the AlmaLinux Community Chat and ~testing Channel, post a question on our 9.6 Beta Forum, on our AlmaLinux Community on Reddit or catch us on X.
Enjoy this Beta release, let us know what you think and stay tuned.
Happy Testing!
