RHEL (and Rocky and Alma Linux) 9.4 Released - Plus AI Offerings (almalinux.org) 19
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 has been released. But also released is Rocky Linux 9.4, reports 9to5Linux:
Rocky Linux 9.4 also adds openSUSE's KIWI next-generation appliance builder as a new image build workflow and process for building images that are feature complete with the old images... Under the hood, Rocky Linux 9.4 includes the same updated components from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4
This week also saw the release of Alma Linux 9.4 stable (the "forever-free enterprise Linux distribution... binary compatible with RHEL.") The Register points out that while Alma Linux is "still supporting some aging hardware that the official RHEL 9.4 drops, what's new is largely the same in them both."
And last week also saw the launch of the AlmaLinux High-Performance Computing and AI Special Interest Group (SIG). HPCWire reports: "AlmaLinux's status as a community-driven enterprise Linux holds incredible promise for the future of HPC and AI," said Hayden Barnes, SIG leader and Senior Open Source Community Manager for AI Software at HPE. "Its transparency and stability empowers researchers, developers and organizations to collaborate, customize and optimize their computing environments, fostering a culture of innovation and accelerating breakthroughs in scientific research and cutting-edge AI/ML."
And this week, InfoWorld reported: Red Hat has launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), described as a foundation model platform that allows users to more seamlessly develop and deploy generative AI models. Announced May 7 and available now as a developer preview, RHEL AI includes the Granite family of open-source large language models (LLMs) from IBM, InstructLab model alignment tools based on the LAB (Large-Scale Alignment for Chatbots) methodology, and a community-driven approach to model development through the InstructLab project, Red Hat said.
This week also saw the release of Alma Linux 9.4 stable (the "forever-free enterprise Linux distribution... binary compatible with RHEL.") The Register points out that while Alma Linux is "still supporting some aging hardware that the official RHEL 9.4 drops, what's new is largely the same in them both."
And last week also saw the launch of the AlmaLinux High-Performance Computing and AI Special Interest Group (SIG). HPCWire reports: "AlmaLinux's status as a community-driven enterprise Linux holds incredible promise for the future of HPC and AI," said Hayden Barnes, SIG leader and Senior Open Source Community Manager for AI Software at HPE. "Its transparency and stability empowers researchers, developers and organizations to collaborate, customize and optimize their computing environments, fostering a culture of innovation and accelerating breakthroughs in scientific research and cutting-edge AI/ML."
And this week, InfoWorld reported: Red Hat has launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), described as a foundation model platform that allows users to more seamlessly develop and deploy generative AI models. Announced May 7 and available now as a developer preview, RHEL AI includes the Granite family of open-source large language models (LLMs) from IBM, InstructLab model alignment tools based on the LAB (Large-Scale Alignment for Chatbots) methodology, and a community-driven approach to model development through the InstructLab project, Red Hat said.
THANK YOU JEEBUS (Score:3)
Hopefully whatever they do there will rub off on Fedora. It's always a massive pain to get setup...not least of which because NVidia usually develops one or two GCC versions behind (and you can't use incompatible versions with nvcc), and by the time they're caught up, the distro is already end-of-life.
Re: (Score:2)
* bootc -- bootable containers. A way to build ami, qcow2, vmdk, etc images in the same way one builds container images.
* Granite LLM -- Apache 2 licensed LLM.
* InstructLab -- tooling for using, managing, and training the LLM
Podman Desktop has a plugin called AI Lab that makes it easy for people to startup AI endpoints. In some ways it is similar to LM Studio, but co
Re: THANK YOU JEEBUS (Score:4, Informative)
What I care about is, does it come with CUDA preinstalled and everything ready to use the vast number of PyTorch-based packages?
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Is it hard to install CUDA on RH? On Debian it's a simple matter of using the runfile installer. This works flawlessly and also doesn't interfere with multiarch like the driver packages do.
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You say in response to a person who uses it constantly.
AlmaLinux "generic cloud" image (Score:3)
For some reason the "generic cloud" image for AlmaLinux 9.4 is missing: the latest available is 9.3. Can't tell if it's been been obsoleted and you're supposed to use something else or if it's just not ready yet. Anyone know?
Re: (Score:3)
RockyLinux and AlmaLinux are two different distros.
In theory Red Hat does not do point releases (Score:1)
Red Hat tried 20 years ago to pretend not to do point releases anymore with Red Hat Linux 9 in 2003. Then, of course, point releases crept back into the naming and release scheme with RHEL, then RHEL tried to eliminate it *again* with the "RHEL 8 Stream" release and pretend, again, the RHEL 9 also did not have point releases. It's very disconcerting if you need consistent deployments.
Re: (Score:1)
You're misremembering. Like Fedora and RHEL, CentOS Stream 8 and 9 are separate upstream products that contain changes and some of the security fixes eventually going into RHEL 8 and 9.
CentOS Linux was a rebuild of RHEL while CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL.
Re: In theory Red Hat does not do point releases (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Red Hat no longer publishes distinctive point release based repositories to refer to via "yum" They now publish only the "Streaming" repository The only way to get a "point release" repository for RHEL, and to get _only_ packages up to that point release, is to generate your own repository from the point release labeled installation media. You can spend quite a lot of money and integration to activate spacewalk, but there is no direct way in spacewalk to say "start this new environment with only the package
Binary compatible? (Score:2)
What kind of brag is this? I would hope one linux distro could run a binary from a different distro.
Re: (Score:2)
What kind of brag is this?
A claim that the binaries they provide in their distro will behave the same as the binaries that appear in the same version of RHEL. Over the last several years, this has become increasingly difficult due to policy changes by IBM/RH.
Re: (Score:2)
What kind of brag is this? I would hope one linux distro could run a binary from a different distro.
Haven't had to think about this for a while, but - wouldn't dynamic libraries mean this isn't necessarily true?
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In short, yes.
Though that's not what they're talking about, I still feel like answering this.
If you try to run a program which was designed for an earlier version of Linux on a modern system it will probably fail for lack of shared libraries.
When you try building those libraries you may well find that the build fails for the same reason. So now you have to build libraries before you can build the libraries. And this will often go several layers deep, and sometimes you get into a situation where some library
Re: Binary compatible? (Score:1)