For the first time, there's a way to carry out software certification on AlmaLinux, and the hardware suite has been rewritten alongside it, with test results from either certification path landing in the same public catalog.
Don't worry about the cost to validate or the uptime of the machine itself. Certifications are free, and the hardware checks no longer require you to install the distro on your setup. Validating, how?
In this particular situation, software certification is basically a listing plus the confirmations that follow it. A publisher adds the product and picks which major versions of AlmaLinux it runs on.
The confirmations come from the people running software on their own hardware across various AlmaLinux releases, though they will need to sign up for an account if they want to post their findings.
Hardware certification is the other half that got some attention.
The alma-certify tool has been rewritten, with the developers claiming it can now achieve sub-10 minute certification runs on most hardware.
Another improvement is that alma-certify doesn't require an AlmaLinux installation anymore because it can work off live media or from an installation already on the machine. There's also a new machine registration flow that makes use of QR codes.
If you didn't know, this tool records what's in the machine, all the way down to drivers and firmware, then starts up a bunch of short checks that decide whether it passes.
Those checks cover a lot of ground, starting from computation and memory errors, storage health, networking drivers, to kernel state, virtualization, GPU, and peripherals.
Tracking results
Everything ends up in the catalog, and each entry is a result anyone can analyze. It holds the systems, components, and software that have been validated, alongside the benchmark figures from the published test runs.
Every major AlmaLinux release is tracked on its own, so provenance can be proved, and everything in the catalog is easily searchable. You can even make use of the free, read-only API to collect data in bulk.
Jonathan Wright, the Infrastructure Lead for AlmaLinux, directed his attention toward potential testers, saying that:
Two things would make all of this worth it. A lot of people and organizations want proof that AlmaLinux runs on the hardware they already own before they’ll give it a try, and now they can get that proof themselves.
Every result that gets submitted makes the case to hardware and software vendors that supporting AlmaLinux officially is a low-effort thing to do.
So if you have hardware sitting in front of you, or software you rely on every day, go tell us that it works. Validations stack, so adding yours to something already listed helps just as much as being the first.
In the end, this will only work if vendors and individual users take the effort to run tests and manually post them on the portal.