I know that Centos 8 has end of life on December 2021.
Everyone is talking about RockyLinux and how cool it is. But nobody mentioned what is EOL of it?
Will it be longer than Centos one?
Is there any information on the website? Any official announcement?
At the moment I cannot see such information.
My guess would be the same date as Red Hat 8
(just my guess)
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Community Support
This is the free support you get from the Rocky Linux community on this forum, and at https://chat.rockylinux.org.
Each minor version is supported until the next minor version is released, which is about 6 months. The exception is the last minor version, which is about 5 years.
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Rocky Linux 8 is supported by the Rocky Linux project until May 2029.
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Rocky Linux 9 is supported by the Rocky Linux project until May 2032.
Paid Support (CIQ, OpenLogic, etc)
This is paid support. Neither the Rocky Linux project or the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation provides paid support (or paid anything, actually). However, there are many fantastic paid support providers available for Rocky Linux, several of whom substantially support the project:
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CIQ - The founding sponsor of the project, provides support for 18 months past the end of community support, for each non-zero even numbered minor release.
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OpenLogic - A principal sponsor of the project, (Perhaps the same as their CentOS policy? I couldn’t find a public schedule on their site, I’ll find out and fill this in later).
Disclaimer
There are many other support providers available for Rocky Linux, but I don’t have information about their support policies. If you use paid support, check with your support provider! I’ve edited this post because it’s widely linked to, and is apparently a source of confusion for customers of paid support providers.
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I’ve mentioned the need of publishing the EOL information on the website in the Mattermost general channel about a month ago. We need this posted to aid in adoption IMHO. There was even a recent Reddit post inquiring for this information.
I think it was pretty much obvious anyway that the projects that spawned because of what RH did with CentOS, that they would be tracking the RHEL EOL like what CentOS used to do. Therefore the 10 year release cycle.
What annoyed the community was not just what RH did by changing CentOS to CentOS Stream, but also by shortening the EOL of CentOS 8 in an attempt to force everyone over to CentOS Stream. They left CentOS 7 with a 10 year EOL as they didn’t shorten this, and a lot of people had already migrated to CentOS 8 only to find that they now have a shortened EOL and have to now repeat the migration process. Therefore I think everyone that followed this would know that the EOL is tracking RHEL and not CentOS Stream EOL.
But doesn’t hurt to publish it, for example like Ubuntu does against the download links. I don’t think it could be more prominent than this. When you go to download you can immediately see how long it would then be supported for.
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thanks for the awesome information.
Do you have an official page to clarify the EOL of RL8.4?
To recommend RL8.4 to someone those who wanted to find a replacement of current CentOS8,
without an evidence(official info) of EOL is not ideal.
If you already have it, please let us know.
Thank you in advance.
The way I treat Rocky8 (and CentOS before this) is that the point releases aren’t supported, as such; I just treat them as a point-in-time release of the major version.
Thus I expect “8.4” to be out of support when “8.5” is released. Simply because if you properly patch your 8.4 system then you’ll have an 8.5.
Instead I track the major release; Rocky 8 is supported until 2029.
Thank you @sweh for the clarification!
I should have asked EOL of RL8.
Do you have any source of info about “Rocky 8 is supported until 2029”??
Thank you again for your help.
As @sweh pointed out, the point release versions are just a point of time. The moment 8.5 drops, 8.4 is no longer supported and a dnf update will bring you to the latest. We only support what is latest and current as released by upstream and us.
RHEL has generally had a 10 year lifecycle on a release where the first 5 years is fully supported (which is generally two point releases a year) and then goes to maintenance mode for the last 5 years where X.9 is the final (RHEL 5 and 6 are notable exceptions to this, 5 ended with 5.11, 6 ended with 6.10).
Myself and other leads have talked about putting a clarifying page on how the EOL generally works. The red hat policy page actually goes over how they do it and we generally follow the same idea (sans EUS and supporting point releases older than what’s current).
Below is sort of an example. This isn’t perfect and is more of a projection based on how releases have historically happened. For the sake of the example, I threw in when expected future EL drop times, which historically is around the .6 of the current production release. (EL9 and EL10 are just examples and are likely not accurate, but the EL8 should be pretty close to accurate). This tries to follow the “every 3 years” plan that Red Hat has said they would be doing going forward.
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Thank you for your detailed answer!
It helps a lot.
Hi @nazunalika,
would it be possible to post the release and end of life schedules on the website?
Regards
Matthias
In terms of the language used, it might be best to refer people to the RH schedules, as opposed to stating specific dates, because things can change (as we’ve seen with CentOS).
+1 on getting the EoL schedule on the website.
We’re tracking these on https://endoflife.date, and having a primary source (instead of a forum post) to refer to would be so much better.
PR here: Add Rocky Linux by istiak101 · Pull Request #487 · endoflife-date/endoflife.date · GitHub
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thanks my issue has been fixed.