AlmaLinux Now Available on Arm Processors Through Community Collaboration with Arm, AWS, Equinix Metal, and Oregon State University

Leading CentOS alternative gains acceptance worldwide, adds availability for Arm-based data center, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, cloud and edge workloads

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, a non-profit overseeing the only community-owned and community-driven open source enterprise-grade alternative to CentOS, today announced availability of AlmaLinux OS for Arm processors. This is the result of cooperation among Arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Equinix, and the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab.

Now, servers and computers powered by Arm processors are able to run the AlmaLinux OS, which can be downloaded from any of the more than 130 mirrors around the world, and images for use on cloud computing platforms including cloud-init, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker and Vagrant are available on GitHub.

AlmaLinux OS has gained wide acceptance worldwide since becoming generally available two months ago.

• Tens of thousands of downloads from its primary mirror site, plus an undetermined number from 133 other mirror sites around the world.
• 22,200 pulls of AlmaLinux images on Docker Hub
• 1,000 Vagrant boxes deployed
• Hundreds of AWS deployments
• 145 stars for the AlmaLinux migration script
• Contributions from people all over the world

“We are pleased to see AlmaLinux add support for ARM64 and Graviton,” said Matt Asay, head of open source strategy and marketing at AWS. “This will give AWS customers another strong choice when deploying open source solutions.”

AlmaLinux OS for Arm is current with the latest 8.4 release that includes:

• A new geo-location based mirror infrastructure to ensure fast downloads for updates and new releases
• OpenSCAP security profiles support for production workloads
• A repository for developers with extra packages and build dependencies
• New module streams and compiler updates

“One of our guiding principles is to be true to open source, to work together and to contribute upstream for everyone’s benefit. The indispensable help from ARM, AWS, Equinix Metal, and Oregon State University – both in terms of infrastructure used for development and testing as well as their tremendous technical expertise, reflects the true nature of community,” said Jack Aboutboul, community manager of AlmaLinux. “We’re already seeing lots of user adoption on AWS, which was instrumental in ensuring that workloads in the cloud on Graviton processors are well supported and now we have Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) available in every region. Equinix Metal also worked closely with us in a mutual collaboration where we’ve contributed upstream to their Tinkerbell open source bare metal provisioning platform.”

Full details are available in the AlmaLinux OS for Arm Release Notes.

About AlmaLinux OS

AlmaLinux OS is an open source and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution, governed and driven by the community, focused on long-term stability and a robust production-grade platform. AlmaLinux OS is a 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL and was founded by the team behind the well-established CloudLinux OS.