RLC Pro AI

RLC Pro AI is an AI-optimized edition of Rocky Linux from CIQ, built for organizations that run artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads in production. It extends the enterprise foundation of RLC Pro with the CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK) and a GPU software stack that is validated to work together before it ever reaches your hardware.

RLC Pro AI virtually eliminates the weeks of setup work that general-purpose Enterprise Linux forces on AI teams: installing GPU drivers, untangling framework dependency conflicts, and validating that the pieces actually cooperate before anything reaches production. RLC Pro AI ships with that work already done, so you can go from bare metal to running inference in minutes rather than weeks.

Key Features

Modern hardware support

The CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK) tracks the upstream kernel.org long-term support releases rather than freezing at a point in time. RLC Pro AI 9.7 ships CLK 6.12, delivering GPU and accelerator hardware enablement up to 18 months ahead of enterprise distributions running frozen kernels.

A stack validated to work together

Pre-installed is not the same as validated. CIQ engineers the kernel, driver, CUDA, and framework combinations before release, and updates are tested together before they ship. PyTorch works from the first boot, with no manual dependency resolution:


python3 -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__)"


2.8.0.post12

The pre-installed PyTorch is a CUDA-enabled build. On systems with a supported NVIDIA GPU it uses the GPU immediately; on systems without one, it runs on the CPU.

Pre-integrated accelerator stack

The NVIDIA data center driver (open kernel modules), the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, and supporting components such as NCCL, cuDNN, Fabric Manager, and IMEX ship pre-integrated and compatibility-tested against the CLK kernel. There is no driver compilation step and no version conflict troubleshooting at deployment time.

Production-ready security

Every package is cryptographically signed by CIQ, Secure Boot is supported through a CIQ-signed shim, and SELinux runs in enforcing mode by default. An SBOM accompanies each image, and Confidential Computing support is included.

Deployment flexibility

The same validated stack runs on bare metal, on-premises virtualization, and the major clouds. RLC Pro AI is available for x86_64 and aarch64 as installation ISOs, cloud images (QCOW2), and OCI container images, through the CIQ Portal, CIQ Depot, and the AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces.

Enterprise support and indemnification

CIQ bug fixes and security patches ship to RLC Pro AI customers backed by commercial SLAs, with premium tiers providing direct access to CIQ's Enterprise Linux experts. Comprehensive IP indemnification removes the risk and liability concerns that open source AI stacks raise for legal and compliance teams.

Validated Performance

CIQ benchmarks RLC Pro AI against stock Ubuntu on identical hardware. Per the RLC Pro AI solution brief (based on 520+ benchmark runs across 11 systems, NVIDIA A30 GPU, 95% confidence interval):

Up to 32% faster on image segmentation
Up to 10% faster on LLM inference
3:44 average time from deployment to first inference, versus 30 to 60 minutes of manual CUDA configuration per node

The RLC Pro Family

RLC Pro AI is part of the Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro product family, alongside RLC Pro, RLC Pro Hardened, and RLC+. All family members maintain full Enterprise Linux binary compatibility, so your existing tooling, packages, and operational knowledge carry over unchanged.

Getting Started

Getting Started - Downloading images and choosing a deployment method.
Installation - Requirements, KVM/QEMU deployment, and post-installation setup.
User Guides - Working with the pre-installed AI frameworks.
Admin Guides - Repository architecture and system management.

Getting Started with RLC Pro AI