The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is on a roll! The RESF released Rocky Linux 9.3 last week, followed by Rocky Linux 8.9 this week! (In case you were wondering, the RESF release schedule follows the order of the RHEL releases.) As the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux, we’d like to send a big shoutout to our team as well as the entire developer community for all their hard work on this 8.9 release for the x86-64 and aarch64 architectures. It features significant new features and changes that we’ll highlight in this blog post. 

You can now download Rocky Linux 8.9 for x86-64 and aarch64 architectures from the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation website. Be sure to review the release notes in the Rocky Linux 8.9 documentation before you get started, which includes important information about known bugs and changes. 

Notable new features and changes

• java-21-openjdk was introduced, providing a new version of Java
• Node.js 20 is now available as a new module stream
• gcc-toolset-13 was introduced as a new compiler toolset

You can find a complete list of new features and changes in the Rocky Linux 8.9 Release Notes.

Breaking changes

• Azure images for Rocky Linux 8.9 will be published under a new publisher name: resf, instead of the previous long, unreadable name. These images are not published yet, but should be available by the end of the week and will be accompanied by another news post.
• The optional guest-agents group, previously available within both the Minimal Install and Custom Operating System base environments in anaconda, is no longer available for selection as additional software for those environments. Consult release notes for more details.
• The KDE live image for Rocky Linux 8.9 had problems during the testing phase. For this, we will be providing the older 8.8 images until we can build and provide a working image.