On 16 June 2022, the CloudLinux team announced that CloudLinux OS 8.6 is now available. This release follows on from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 and the underlying AlmaLinux 8.6, and comes with CloudLinux’s own LVE-enabled kernel.

Key changes

• The kernel has been updated to version 4.18.0-372.9.1.1.lve.el8 to match the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 release.
• The LVE kernel module has been updated to version 2.0-43.
• New ‘Streams’ module:
  • PHP 8.0
  • Perl 5.32
  • log4j 2
  • container-tools 4.0
• OpenSSH supports drop-in configuration files, so the SSH server’s settings can be organised into separate files.

The LVE module is the kernel component that limits CPU, memory, I/O and process usage per hosting account, to ensure that an overloaded website cannot slow down other users on the server. We have described how much of these resources an account uses in our article on LVE resource usage monitoring.

PHP 8.0 can be enabled at system level via the module system:

dnf module reset php
dnf module install php:8.0

Under CloudLinux, the PHP version for hosting accounts is typically managed by the PHP Selector, where each user can choose a version for their own website.

A full list of changes can be found in the RHEL 8.6 release notes.

How to update to it

Upgrading from CloudLinux 8.5 involves two steps: first, you need to update the cloudlinux-release package, which provides the repository settings required for 8.6, and then update the entire system:

dnf install cloudlinux-release
dnf update

Check the output of dnf and accept the update. These days, running dnf update on its own will update you to the latest point release of CloudLinux 8.

The devel repository

The 8.6 repositories contain fewer packages than CloudLinux releases prior to 8.5. From version 8.5 onwards, CloudLinux is based on AlmaLinux, which does not include a number of development and static packages; these have been moved to a separate ‘devel’ repository, which is disabled by default. It can be temporarily enabled during installation, but CloudLinux does not recommend updating from it or leaving it enabled permanently:

dnf --enablerepo=devel install bash-devel

How long is it supported for?

CloudLinux OS 8 follows the RHEL 8 lifecycle and will receive updates until 31 May 2029 (see our article on the CloudLinux lifecycle). You can upgrade to version 9 locally using the ELevate tool: Upgrading CloudLinux from 8 to 9 with ELevate. Further releases in the 8 series:

• CloudLinux OS 8.7 (November 2022)
• CloudLinux OS 8.8 (May 2023)
• CloudLinux OS 8.9 (November 2023)
• CloudLinux OS 8.10 (May 2024, the final point release in the series)

Our cPanel hosting plans run on CloudLinux, and it can also be installed as an operating system on our KVM VPS servers.

• cloudlinux
• release
• almalinux
• red hat