AlmaLinux’s New Beefed-Up Hardware and Software Certification

AlmaLinux’s new certification platform aims to make finding out how well your hardware and software will work with AlmaLinux as easy as looking at its certification catalog.

AlmaLinux announced on Thursday that it’s time to certify. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because two years ago the Linux distribution that’s a drop-in replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux launched a platform to certify that AlmaLinux runs properly on specific hardware. Now it’s released a new, improved, and expanded version.

The original version, released by the AlmaLinux Certification SIG in September 2024, was a groundbreaker. It made AlmaLinux the first RHEL clone to offer hardware certification, something that Red Hat was already offering its users. The problem was that AlmaLinux’s version was time-consuming.

“The old program worked, but it asked too much time of you and of us, and this is how we fixed it!” Jonathan Wright, AlmaLinux’s Infrastructure SIG lead and a member of its Engineering Steering Committee, explained in Thursday’s announcement on the distro’s website.

The platform addresses a big stumbling block users face when thinking about switching from something like, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux to AlmaLinux. The issue is whether they’ll make the change only to find that the new distro doesn’t work well on some of their hardware. There’s a similar problem with software, which can exhibit bugs when running on one distro that doesn’t exist when it runs on another distro.

“The suite is rewritten, and for the overwhelming majority of systems a certification run now finishes in under 10 minutes,” Wright said.

Software was always intended to be part of the deal. Back in 2024, Wright figured that software certification was a couple of months away. It took longer than that, but it’s now here in a process that’s so simple that even I could probably certify something.

What This Certification Means

Because the meaning of the term “certification” is a bit fluid, I asked the AlmaLinux Foundation’s board chair benny Vasquez if the hardware certification sticks firmly to whether the distro will run or not, or if some sort of regulatory certification is implied.

“For us in this context, it only means we know that AlmaLinux runs correctly on this hardware, or this software runs correctly on AlmaLinux,” she replied. “It’s about compatibility, and isn’t intended to mean any regulatory or security certification on its own.

“There are a number of people and organizations who are looking for proof that AlmaLinux runs on the hardware they own before they’ll even give it a shot,” she continued. “That’s one of the biggest benefits we expect out of this. The other is proving to the hardware and software vendors that adding official AlmaLinux support should be a relatively low-effort task.”

That doesn’t mean that AlmaLinux can’t be certified by regulatory agencies. In fact, it already is — with additional certifications on the way.

“We do also have regulatory certifications,” she said. “AlmaLinux OS 9.2 carries FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules on NIST’s CMVP Active list, including the first FIPS 140-3 kernel certificate for an EL9 distribution, and 9.6 is in the validation pipeline now. AlmaLinux OS 9.2 is also Common Criteria certified at EAL1 and listed on Japan’s JISEC registry.”

The Three Faces of AlmaLinux Certification

Not only does AlmaLinux now allow for certification of both hardware and software, it also allows for certification from three distinct groups: vendors, users, and the AlmaLinux Foundation itself.

I asked Wright if “Vendor validated” means that the hardware or software vendors have tested their products so they can guarantee it’ll work on AlmaLinux.

“Yup, though I’m not sure they’d like the word ‘guarantee,'” he said. “Vendor-validated means the hardware vendor ran the testing themselves and published the results under a verified vendor account. It’s the vendor making a statement about their own product.”

Being that vendors’ motivation for putting their products through this testing is potential sales or licensing to AlmaLinux users, I wondered if any double-checking is done after vendors report their results.

“For sure,” he said. “We currently validate two different ways. First, a vendor account has to be verified before anything can be published on that vendor’s behalf. Second, every submission goes into a review queue before it appears in the catalog, identified by whether it comes from a vendor, from a community member, or from us.

“Community confirmations will appear on the same listing as a vendor’s certification,” he added. “If we have a community validation show up for something, and a vendor later wants to add their own validation for it, the listing will prioritize showing the vendor validation, but all of them will remain on the page.”

I figured that the community validation would mainly consist of the kind of anecdotal “yeah it works on my machine pretty good” reports that are common on sites like Reddit.

“Community-validated isn’t anecdotal,” Wright said. “A community member runs the same certification suite that we run and that the vendors run, and those results are what gets listed. The tier tells you who did the run, not how rigorous or trustworthy it is. What separates it from a vendor certification is accountability rather than evidence, because a vendor is making a commitment about a product they sell and support.”

Like the other two, AlmaLinux validated means exactly what it says, that the foundation did the testing — either on reference hardware or against a published product — and published the result.

“Validations — software and hardware — are designed to be cumulative,” he said. “Vendors, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and community members can all add attestations to increase the confidence in a given certification.”

The Software Difference

According to Vasquez, although software also includes testing performed by users, AlmaLinux Foundation, and software vendors, the methodology is different.

“There’s no real equivalent suite you can run against an application the way you can against hardware,” she said. “A software certification is validated against a major AlmaLinux version.”

“Those all sit together on a certification for a specific piece of software,” she added. “That means that the additional certifications reinforce each other. For example, you might see a product certified by its vendor on AlmaLinux 9 and confirmed by twelve community members on 10. But the flimsiness of software support across hardware and environments is the only thing that makes community-validated more anecdotal here.”

I also checked with her on my assumption that there’s something of a focus on validating software that’s typically run on RHEL deployments.

“Our priority is the software our community tells us they’re running, so yes,” she said. “While we will always be led by what our community needs, the needs of our community nearly always meet up with the use cases in the greater Enterprise Linux community.”

How to Participate and Where to Look for Results

If you’re wondering where to look to see what hardware or software has been validated for what version of AlmaLinux, go to the AlmaLinux Certification Catalog. Every listing identifies the tester, whether it was the vendor, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, or a community member. The listings show information for systems, components, software, benchmarks, and validations.

Publishing results to the catalog requires an AlmaLinux account, and every submission, whether it’s from a community member, a vendor, or AlmaLinux, is reviewed before it’s put online. Complete details can be found on the certification page. All of the catalog’s data is available through a public, read-only API, so users can use their own tooling if that’s useful.