AlmaLinux 9.4 beta prepares to tread where RHEL dares not

The AlmaLinux project has announced the beta of version 9.4, with some small but intriguing differences from Red Hat's plans for RHEL 9.4. The Alma 9.4 beta follows 20 days after Red Hat announced the beta test of RHEL 9.4 and RHEL 8.10.

As usual, the IBM subsidiary has a humongous set of release notes for the 9.4 beta, which in PDF form totals 167 pages. Highlights include new driver support for kit including Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator, NVMe-over-TCP, and support for DEP and the NX bit as early as the GRUB bootloader. Plus, at long last, support for Intel's Software Guard Extensions. It took Intel a few years to offer Linux drivers after SGX first appeared in 2013, and The Reg has been reporting on issues with the tech every year or two ever since.

The AlmaLinux team's beta release notes are much shorter and more to the point, especially the changelog section. This summarizes the highlights: Git 2.43, Git LFS 3.4.1, plus some optional new versions, Python 3.12, Ruby 3.3, PHP 8.2, nginx 1.24, MariaDB 10.11, and PostgreSQL 16.

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