AlmaLinux OS Foundation welcomes AMD to the fold

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is pulling in new members from the world of mainframes, hosting and IT services to contribute to the project and deliver a community-supported Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The non-profit organization that oversees AlmaLinux said four new entrants had arrived, with AMD, BlackHOST, and KnownHost joining at the Silver Member level, and Sine Nomine Associates joining the Gold tier.

The foundation expects the contributions from these new members to help in bring AlmaLinux closer to full parity with RHEL.

AlmaLinux was started up last year in response to Red Hat's decision to effectively kill off the CentOS project it had operated up to that point and replace it with CentOS Stream, a kind of preview of what to expect in RHEL rather than a binary-compatible build.

"We founded the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for the specific goal of creating a CentOS successor that allowed those who had a stake in the future of the operating system to also have a voice," chair Benny Vasquez said in a statement welcoming the new members.

AMD said it is joining the AlmaLinux OS Foundation in order to sustain support for its products. The firm has seen growing adoption in the enterprise and high-performance computing (HPC) space for its Epyc processors, and so has an interest in ensuring that production-grade enterprise Linux distributions run smoothly on its processors.

Sine Nomine Associates is a custom engineering and development firm that provides consulting and support services to universities, plus government, banking, and finance sectors. The firm claims to have pioneered the virtual server farm concept using Linux on IBM mainframe systems.

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KnownHost is a managed web hosting provider, and therefore has a stake in a free and open-source enterprise-grade Linux, as its COO Daniel Pearson explained in a statement.

"Web hosting runs on Linux and AlmaLinux provides a clean CentOS migration path and strong community engagement. By joining the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, we will continue to provide the best web hosting technology solutions for our customers," Pearson said.

BlackHOST offers a range of IT services for businesses and enthusiasts, but claims to specialize in unmetered networking hardware ranging from 1Gbps up to 100Gbps, utilizing datacenters and network points of presence around the world.

BlackHOST CTO Thomas Nuchatel said it has made AlmaLinux its default choice for clients seeking virtual private servers and dedicated servers.

"Linux is a key technology in web hosting and a range of other cloud infrastructure services, and AlmaLinux is the type of community-based distribution that provides value to our customers," he said.

The foundation said that AlmaLinux recently passed over 1 million Docker pulls, plus there is now a beta release for AlmaLinux 8.5 for PowerPC. And the foundation has its first Platinum sponsor, Codenotary, and claimed to have released AlmaLinux 8.5 within 48 hours of the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. ®