CIQ ships RLC Pro AI on the newest long-term Linux kernel and converts accelerator capability into production throughput
RLC Pro AI runs the latest long-term Linux kernel, 6.18, with the GPU stack tuned and validated at first boot, and now
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RENO, Nev., Sept. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, today moved RLC Pro AI to Linux 6.18, the latest long-term kernel. Enterprises get the latest kernel features with a vendor standing behind them, and the same tuned stack now runs anywhere they put an AI workload.
As organizations across every industry move GPU-accelerated workloads into production, most of those workloads now run in containers. Containers make a workload portable, but they do not control the layer underneath it. The operating system still decides how much of the accelerator capacity an enterprise paid for reaches the workload.
Enterprise Linux pins that layer for predictability, so the kernel underneath a traditional enterprise release is frozen at general availability, while the accelerators below it and the frameworks above it turn over continuously. Teams are forced to choose stability or speed.
RLC Pro AI runs the latest long-term kernel to provide the stability critical infrastructure demands, with the speed to keep pace with the evolution of AI. It runs the CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK) which tracks the upstream 6.18 series. CIQ patches the kernel directly and ships it between distribution releases, so support for new accelerators reaches customers months faster than Enterprise Linux upstream.
“What I have seen consistently is teams tune the frameworks, the GPU kernel code and the models, and then use whatever general-purpose OS is available,” said Brian Dawson, Director of Product Management at CIQ. “The OS layer decides how much you can get in and out of the GPU, and whether you get the throughput you paid for.”
What RLC Pro AI delivers
- Run the latest long-term kernel. RLC Pro AI runs Linux 6.18, the latest long-term release from kernel.org, maintained by upstream stable maintainers and supported commercially by CIQ. Providing the latest hardware support with Enterprise Linux
backing. Only the kernel changes, so applications certified for Rocky Linux run unmodified. - Get more output from the GPUs you already own. CLK 6.18 ships with the NVIDIA 580 driver, the CUDA Toolkit, and a CIQ-built PyTorch validated together at first boot, without manual tuning. Model loading executes 33.8 percent faster, and time to first token improves 1.38 times under CPU contention, compared to the backported 5.14 Enterprise Linux kernel. Organizations running inference at scale get more throughput from the same hardware.
- Deploy anywhere you run AI. Base, runtime, and development container images ship on the same cadence as the operating system, so one configuration carries from a researcher’s workstation to rack scale and from experimentation into production. The same images run on bare metal, in virtual machines, across major cloud providers, and on Kubernetes. Ollama runs on the same validated stack, so a team can pull it and serve a model for local experimentation without assembling a CUDA environment first. The development image is free on Quay.io and Docker Hub.
- Stay on Enterprise Linux. RLC Pro AI ships with every CVE fix from its upstream long-term branch, a Secure Boot-signed kernel and signed modules, and multi-year support from engineers who have spent decades in HPC and Linux. Enterprises get the latest kernel on the terms they already buy Enterprise Linux on.
“Enterprises are committing enormous budgets to GPU infrastructure, and the software underneath decides how much of it they get back,” said Bjorn Hovland, President of CIQ. “We build that layer and we support it ourselves, so one company is accountable for the return on it. We license per node, so adding GPUs does not raise the software bill.”
CIQ engineers contribute directly to the upstream Linux kernel community, so defects CIQ customers surface are fixed at the source.
RLC Pro AI is available from CIQ through the portal and through the AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces, as installer ISOs, cloud images and OCI container images. It is part of the Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro family alongside RLC+, RLC Pro, and RLC Pro Hardened.
Come see RLC Pro AI running at the AI Infra Summit, September 15 to 17, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, booth 638. To learn more, visit ciq.com or contact info@ciq.com.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, building Enterprise Linux optimized for the workloads that matter most to its customers. Whether an organization runs AI inference at scale or operates under STIG and FIPS requirements, CIQ distributions carry those optimizations from the kernel through the containerized stack, with deployment supported across bare metal, virtual machines, cloud marketplaces and Kubernetes. More than 2.75 million Rocky Linux instances run worldwide, and 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies use CIQ supported technologies.
Contact:
Stephanie Schlegal
ciq@offleashpr.com
