Software certification is here, and hardware certification takes under 10 minutes

Key points

AlmaLinux has relaunched its certification program. Two years after announcing the Certification SIG and hardware certification, the project now adds software certification, a rewritten test suite anyone can run, the ability to certify a machine from live media, and a public catalog for the results. The post is dated 24 September 2026.

Software certification

• Software can now be certified for AlmaLinux, not only hardware.
• Publishers list their product, cite the AlmaLinux releases it supports and submit; a company not yet in the catalog can be created in the same step.
• Users and community members can sign in to catalog.almalinux.org and confirm that a product works on the release they run.

Hardware certification in under 10 minutes

• The suite, alma-certify, is a full rewrite that replaces the earlier Ansible-based one. It runs directly on the machine being certified and produces a report the catalog can ingest. It is open source.
• For the overwhelming majority of systems a run finishes in under 10 minutes.
• It ships as an RPM in the extras repository:

dnf install alma-certify

• AlmaLinux does not need to be installed: the live media is enough, so a machine in service can be rebooted, certified and returned to its job untouched.
• Run with no arguments, alma-certify walks through the options, builds the command from your answers and runs it after approval.
• To register a machine, it shows a code that you approve from your browser or by scanning a QR code with a phone. The project asks datacenter operators to add this to new server deployments.
• The suite records a normalized inventory: CPUs, memory, disks, network cards, GPUs, firmware and driver versions.
• Benchmarks are still available but no longer run by default. They cover CPU, memory bandwidth and latency, network throughput, cryptography, compression, compilation, scheduling and GPU compute, and feed public leaderboards.

The catalog

• catalog.almalinux.org lists systems, components, software, benchmarks and validations.
• Each listing says who tested it: the vendor, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation or a community member. Validations stack and are tracked per AlmaLinux major version.
• Publishing requires an AlmaLinux Account, and every submission is reviewed before it appears.
• All data is available through a public, read-only API.
• Vendors can submit results for unannounced hardware and set the date they become public.

What the certification means

• It is a statement of compatibility: AlmaLinux runs correctly on the hardware, or the software runs correctly on AlmaLinux.
• It is not a regulatory or security certification. Those exist separately: FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules and Common Criteria at EAL1.

What the project wants tested

• Mainstream desktops and servers first, then laptops, workstations and their GPUs, and anything on aarch64.
• Creative software: DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Nuke, Houdini, Krita, GIMP, Kdenlive and OBS.
• Production software: databases, control panels, monitoring and backup agents.
• Questions go to the SIG/Certification chat room; the "Contribute a Certification" guide walks through a run from start to finish.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.