English
Magyar
Rocky Linux 9.6 was officially released to the general public on 4 June 2025. The updated installer, container, cloud and live images are available from the Rocky Linux download page. The release is based on the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6, uses the 5.14.0-570.18.1 kernel, and was tested for a week before being approved by the team.
Software versions in Rocky Linux 9.6
From a web server perspective, the most significant new feature in version 9.6 is the arrival of PHP 8.3, MySQL 8.4 and nginx 1.26 as module streams.
| Area | Versions |
|---|---|
| Languages, web and database servers | PHP 8.3, nginx 1.26, MySQL 8.4 |
| Compilers and toolkits | LLVM Toolset 19.1.7, Rust Toolset 1.84.1, Go Toolset 1.23 |
| Debugging | Valgrind 3.24.0, SystemTap 5.2, elfutils 0.192, libabigail 2.6 |
| Performance monitoring | Performance Co-Pilot 6.3.2, Grafana 10.2.6 |
Here’s how to enable PHP 8.3 on an existing server:
dnf module reset php
dnf module install php:8.3
Before switching, it is worth checking whether your website’s CMS and plugins support PHP 8.3. The SELinux policy has also placed new services within a restricted scope (iio-sensor-proxy, power-profiles-daemon, switcheroo-control, samba-bgqd).
New cloud images and WSL
From version 9.6 onwards, Cloud SIG builds the majority of its images using the KIWI tool; only the Vagrant (Libvirt, VirtualBox, VMware) and Oracle Cloud base images are still created using the old ImageFactory. A new image type is the Rocky-9-WSL-Base, available in x86_64 and aarch64 versions, designed for the Windows Subsystem for Linux; it runs on Windows 10 and 11 and prompts for a username on first boot. The utilities for the Oracle Cloud images have also been updated to the latest version.
Known issues
- ZFS: the OpenZFS module released at launch did not load on version 9.6, so users of ZFS had to wait for the updated module before upgrading from version 9.5.
- SELinux and passt: if the virtual machine’s network is running with passt in the background and SELinux is enabled, the interface will not start.
- GStreamer update error: if GStreamer plugins previously installed from an external repository are preventing the update, according to the release notes, they can be replaced using these commands:
sudo dnf swap gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-1:1.22.1-1.el9.x86_64 gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free-1.22.12-3.el9.x86_64
sudo dnf swap gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld-1:1.22.1-1.el9.x86_64 gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-1.22.12-4.el9_6.x86_64
A full list of changes can be found in the Rocky Linux 9.6 release notes and the RHEL 9.6 release notes.
ISO verification
You can check the downloaded installation ISO in the folder where you saved it, as follows:
curl -O https://dl.rockylinux.org/vault/rocky/9.6/isos/x86_64/CHECKSUM
sha256sum -c CHECKSUM --ignore-missing
The message ‘OK’ should appear next to the downloaded image file. The packages are signed by the Rocky Linux 9 GPG key (RPM-GPG-KEY-Rocky-9, fingerprint: 21CB 256A E16F C54C 6E65 2949 702D 426D 350D 275D).
Update and migration
An existing Rocky Linux 9 system can be updated using the usual command:
sudo dnf -y upgrade
You can migrate from other Enterprise Linux 9 distributions using the migrate2rocky script. There is no official upgrade path from Rocky Linux 8; the project recommends a fresh installation. We have outlined the steps for the community-developed ELevate tool in our ELevate guide.
How long is it supported for?
Active support for Rocky Linux 9 (“Blue Onyx”) runs until 31 May 2027, and its lifecycle ends on 31 May 2032. Only the latest minor version receives updates. Further releases in the 9 series:
- Rocky Linux 9.0 (July 2022)
- Rocky Linux 9.1 (November 2022)
- Rocky Linux 9.2 (May 2023)
- Rocky Linux 9.3 (November 2023)
- Rocky Linux 9.4 (May 2024)
- Rocky Linux 9.5 (November 2024)
- Rocky Linux 9.7 (December 2025)
- Rocky Linux 9.8 (May 2026)
A week later, the new major release, Rocky Linux 10.0, was released.
You can choose Rocky Linux as your operating system on both our KVM VPS servers and our dedicated servers.