AlmaLinux shows off its new Kitten

The AlmaLinux team unveiled a new distribution, but don't get too excited. It's not meant to be a new flavor or intended for production use.

AlmaLinux OS Kitten is a new variety of AlmaLinux, but not a new distro, or a new version, or anything that is really intended for real deployment or use. "Kitten" is more like a public prototype of what will in time become AlmaLinux 10. Kitten, combined with the project's other announcement, is in part due to the latest of Red Hat's changes in its development and release process.

Back in February, the IBM subsidiary announced that it would stop releasing separate betas of RHEL point releases. Previously, the Big Purple Hat's release schedule saw it emit a point version every six months, with a public beta a month ahead of release. Now it's switching to phased releases of beta versions of individual packages.

The Reg FOSS desk may of course simply be overly cynical, but to us this looks like the latest in the long series of steps to make life a little more difficult for RHEL downstreams, as we summarized last year. This began way back in 2011, when the company started combining updates into one big file in order to complicate things for Oracle et al. At the time, Linux Weekly News called this obfuscated kernel source.

The next minor release of RHEL will be RHEL 9.5, and there won't be a public beta... but for a taste of what it will be like, there is a beta of AlmaLinux 9.5. As far as we can see at this time, there is currently no news about Rocky Linux 9.5.

Taking a longer-term view, AlmaLinux Kitten is derived from CentOS Stream 10, and it is an internal upstream of what will in time become AlmaLinux 10. As the project wiki says:

There are already a bunch of changes to differentiate Kitten from its CentOS Stream 10 upstream. As did AlmaLinux 9.4 in April, it will support hardware that CentOS and RHEL are dropping. In this case, it supports version 2 of the x86-64 instruction set. When SUSE was weighing up which versions to support, we described the versions and their differences... and when it chose, we mentioned that RHEL 9 needs x86-64-v2. So does Alma's Kitten, while its purple-hued upstream needs x86-64-v3 or higher.

This does mean a degree of incompatibility as it may be that products that target CentOS 10 or RHEL 10 will also need the newer CPUs, and the Alma developers are considering rebuilding the EPEL package repo for the older CPU architecture. Comments, the announcement says, are welcome.

AlmaLinux Kitten also enables frame pointers by default, as does Ubuntu 24.04 and later. The announcement links to a detailed discussion of what this means. It will cause a very small performance decrease, about 1 percent, but enabling them makes performance tuning diagnostics and tools work much better.

Another mention in the release announcement caught our attention. Although the Rocky Linux project tends to make more noise, such as its recently announced certification program, there are lots of other CentOS Linux rebuilds out there, as we noted when the Open Enterprise Linux Alliance was announced. One of the lesser-known distros in the West that we mentioned then has joined up with AlmaLinux: the Japanese Miracle Linux distribution [Pēji wa nihongo desu]. Its creator, Cybertrust, is a platinum sponsor of AlmaLinux.

AlmaLinux Kitten supports KVM on IBM POWER processors, restores the SPICE protocol for accessing the displays of virtual machines, and the standard repositories include RPM packages of both Firefox and Thunderbird - all features removed in RHEL 9 and later releases.

The release notes are already available, and contain details of the newer versions of Kitten's various development tools and so on. Right at the top, there is highlighted:

Some brave souls might, even so. After all, there is a Fedora Server edition out there, which is upstream from CentOS Stream itself. It is famously hard to find out any hard numbers about Linux market share. We still don't know how many organizations use CentOS Stream, but some intrepid souls are, as Reddit revealed. One user is public, and it's bigger than most: Meta uses CentOS Stream. ®