AlmaLinux 10.3 Beta "Mauve Lion" Drops with ModSecurity, Podman 6, and Legacy Hardware Support
AlmaLinux has announced the AlmaLinux 10.3 Beta "Mauve Lion," rolling out on Thursday, September 10. The preview release hits the Enterprise Linux 10 baseline with a refreshed container stack, several new language runtimes, and the return of ModSecurity to the base repositories.
ModSecurity and the OWASP Core Rule Set are finally shipping in EL10 again. They were notably absent through 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2. The beta bumps ModSecurity from 2.9.6 to 2.9.14 and jumps the CRS from 3.3.5 to 4.22.0. CRS 4 is a full rework, which means if you tuned your WAF rules against the 3.x series, you'll need to audit them again. Not exactly painless, but better than running blind.
Container config gets a new address
The container toolchain gets a one-two punch. Podman 6.1.0 ships alongside Buildah 1.45.0, Skopeo 1.24.0, and crun 1.29.1. More importantly, the team is moving vendor defaults out of /etc/containers and into /usr/share/containers. You'll still get drop-in configs for containers.conf, storage.conf, and registries.conf, but the rootful and rootless storage defaults now live in separate files. Hard version pins keep podman, buildah, and skopeo from drifting apart.
Toolsets and runtimes
Developers get their due, too. The system compiler stays at GCC 14.4.1, but the optional GCC Toolset climbs to 16 (gcc 16.1.1, binutils 2.46). LLVM drops to 22.1.8, Rust to 1.97.1, and Node.js lands at 26.1.0 LTS. If you're testing ahead of the .NET 11 stable release, a preview runtime is included. Head here to grab the toolsets before the final build locks them down.
"AlmaLinux 10.3 Beta introduces new compiler toolsets, new language runtimes, and improved security," says Eduard Abdullin, release and automation engineer. "This release adds GCC Toolset 16 alongside updated LLVM and Rust toolsets, and brings Node.js 26 and a .NET 11 preview as new packages."
Pulling away from the RHEL baseline
Here's where AlmaLinux starts pulling away from Red Hat's upstream. The distro is enabling frame pointers system-wide for real-time tracing, re-enabling SPICE for graphics, and keeping KVM for IBM POWER in the stack. It also ships Firefox and Thunderbird as standard RPMs. On the hardware front, you're getting PCI IDs for RAID controllers that haven't seen active support in years. We're talking Dell PERC 2 through 5, Adaptec 5400S, IBM ServeRAID, plus a massive list of LSI and QLogic cards. If your data center still runs gear that peaked during the Obama administration, this is exactly the kind of patch you want.
Keep in mind that the 32-bit userspace support introduced back in 10.2 is still here, along with the x86_64_v2 baseline. Those aren't upstream features, but they fill a real gap for CI environments and legacy workloads.
The distributed kernel sits at 6.12.0-264.el10. Security gets OpenSSL 3.5.7, OpenSSH 9.9p1-30, SELinux-policy 42.1.27, and SSSD 2.13.1. Networking, virtualization, and performance tools round out the stack with NetworkManager 1.58.0, QEMU-KVM 10.1.0, GDB 17.2, and Grafana 12.4.3. It's a meaty preview release, even if it's still labeled beta.
You can grab the ISOs for x86_64, x86_64_v2, i686 (userspace only), ARM64, ppc64le, and s390x. The boot, minimal, and full DVD images are sitting in the standard repo. If you're upgrading an existing EL10 system, there's a simple two-step dnf procedure, though I wouldn't run it on production without first testing it in a sandbox.
The beta is out, which means bug reports are welcome. AlmaLinux keeps the tracking channel active on their forum and chat, and the upstream wiki has the full release notes if you want to dig into the package changelogs. The foundation is also wrapping up a board election under its new bylaws, so governance is shifting alongside the code.
Head here to download the ISOs, or check the full release notes wiki for the complete changelog.
