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On 28 May 2024, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced the release of AlmaLinux OS 8.10, also known as “Cerulean Leopard”. This is the final point release of the 8 series: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also entered the maintenance phase with version 8.10, so from now on, the 8 branch will only receive security and bug-fix updates. Version 8.10 uses the 4.18.0-553.el8_10 kernel.
The installation ISOs are now available for all four architectures on the mirror servers:
How it was made
AlmaLinux corresponds to the releases and software versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and is built from the same sources as RHEL, thus ensuring full compatibility with RHEL, whilst being freely available as open source. If you’d like to gain a deeper understanding of how AlmaLinux is built, watch this 23-minute video, in which the project’s lead architect explains it in detail at AlmaLinux Day in Germany earlier this year:
Release notes and further information
AlmaLinux 8.10 brings updates in the areas of security and data protection, as well as improvements to the web console and system roles, enabling you to automate operations and ensure consistency across complex IT configurations. This release further improves system availability, reliability and recovery processes, whilst also enhancing virtual machine snapshot functionality in hybrid cloud scenarios. New system roles have been introduced to simplify the creation and management of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) snapshots, thereby improving data backup and recovery processes. In version 8.10, performance, scalability and reliability remain at the heart of the updates, to assist developers with application development and management.
Software versions in AlmaLinux 8.10
As this is the final point release in this series, the 8.10 module streams will remain available for the remainder of the 8.x branch’s lifecycle:
| Area | Versions |
|---|---|
| Languages | PHP 8.2, Python 3.12, Ruby 3.3 |
| Web server | nginx 1.24 |
| Databases | MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 16 |
| Version control | Git 2.43.0, Git LFS 3.4.1 |
Here’s how to enable PHP 8.2:
dnf module reset php
dnf module install php:8.2
Security updates
- SCAP Security Guide 0.1.72: updated CIS profiles, a new PCI DSS v4.0 profile and the latest DISA STIG profiles
- libkcapi 1.4.0: new tools and the
-Tswitch for specifying target files for digest calculation - stunnel 5.71: changes to FIPS mode operation with OpenSSL 1.1+ and support for modern PostgreSQL clients
- OpenSSL: API-level protection against Bleichenbacher-type attacks during RSA PKCS #1 v1.5 decryption
Restoring support for older hardware
Following AlmaLinux 9.4, support for several devices that had been disabled in the upstream release has also been reinstated in version 8.10. The aacraid, be2iscsi, be2net, hpsa, lpfc, megaraid_sas, mlx4_core, mpt3sas, mptsas, qla2xxx and qla4xxx drivers now recognise older RAID controllers, Fibre Channel and network cards once again. The full list of devices can be found in the ‘Extended hardware support’ section of the release notes.
ISO verification and the new GPG key
The 8.10 installation ISOs have already been signed with the new AlmaLinux 8 signing key, to which the packages were migrated on 12 January 2024. To verify:
wget https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux
gpg --import RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux
wget https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/8.10/isos/x86_64/CHECKSUM
gpg --verify CHECKSUM
sha256sum AlmaLinux-8.10-x86_64-boot.iso
The output of gpg --verify should show the line “Good signature” and the fingerprint BC5E DDCA DF50 2C07 7F15 8288 2AE8 1E8A CED7 258B, whilst the ISO SHA256 value should match that in the CHECKSUM file.
Update to 8.10
An existing AlmaLinux 8 system can be updated using the usual command:
dnf upgrade -y
If the server has not been updated for a long time and dnf is failing to install packages due to the new key, first import the key using the rpm --import https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux command. Users of the 8.10 beta should first install the final almalinux-release package:
rpm -i https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/8.10/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/almalinux-release-8.10-1.el8.x86_64.rpm --replacefiles
dnf upgrade -y
You can read more about this release in the release notes; the full list of changes can be found in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 release notes.
How long will AlmaLinux 8 be supported, and what’s next?
Active support for AlmaLinux 8 ran until 31 May 2024; security updates will be provided until 31 May 2029. Until then, it is advisable to plan your migration to version 9 (supported until 2032) or version 10 (supported until 2035). You can update locally, without reinstallation, using the ELevate tool; we have described the process step by step in the guide ‘Updating AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux from version 8 to 9 using ELevate’.
Previous instalments in the Series 8:
- AlmaLinux 8.6 (May 2022)
- AlmaLinux 8.7 (November 2022)
- AlmaLinux 8.8 (May 2023)
- AlmaLinux 8.9 (November 2023)
AlmaLinux is also an available operating system on our KVM VPS servers; if you’re choosing it for its support for older hardware, you can also run it on a dedicated server.