AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta is out today for this popular community-oriented Linux distribution derived from upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Besides pulling in the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux 9.4 also restores hardware support for some devices that was deprecated by upstream RHEL.

The [1]RHEL 9.4 Beta shipped in late March with the Intel Data Streaming Accelerator driver being fully supported, Intel SGX now being fully supported, NVMe over TCP being a tech preview feature, the ability to build FIPS-enabled RHEL for Edge images, Python 3.12 can be optionally installed, and many other upgrades available as well as some new module streams.

In addition to AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta pulling in all of the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux has restored support for some older hardware devices that is being phased out upstream. One of the differentiators being pursued by AlmaLinux is to (re)enable support for some older hardware/drivers that otherwise is losing focus with upstream Red Hat. For the AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta the expanded hardware support includes:

aacraid - Dell PERC2, 2/Si, 3/Si, 3/Di, Adaptec Advanced Raid Products, HP NetRAID-4M, IBM ServeRAID & ICP SCSI

be2iscsi - Emulex OneConnectOpen-iSCSI for BladeEngine 2 and 3 adapters

hpsa - HP Smart Array Controller

lpfc - Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel SCSI

megaraid_sas - Broadcom MegaRAID SAS

mpt3sas - LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0

mptsas - Fusion MPT SAS Host

qla2xxx - QLogic Fibre Channel HBA

qla4xxx - QLogic iSCSI HBA

In these cases it was just PCI IDs that needed to be added back in that were dropped by RHEL.

More details on the AlmaLinux 9.4 beta and downloads via [2]AlmaLinux.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL-9.4-Beta

[2] https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-04-15-announcing-94-beta/