What Is RLC+? Rocky Linux with GPU Drivers Built In

I wrote this explainer for CIQ introducing RLC+, the free, GPU-ready tier that sits between community Rocky Linux and the full RLC Pro subscription.

The post is built around a simple observation: Rocky Linux is a great starting point, but at some point your infrastructure asks more of the OS than a baseline install can deliver. GPU workloads need drivers. AI and machine learning pipelines need more than CPU mode to run efficiently. And when something breaks at 2am, the forum is not a satisfying answer.

The core differentiator for RLC+ is preinstalled GPU drivers for both Nvidia and AMD hardware, including the CUDA toolkit and DOCA-OFED for Nvidia, and ROCm for AMD. Installing GPU drivers manually is a chore most people have done exactly once and never want to do again. RLC+ skips that entirely. The post includes a real-world performance benchmark worth noting: according to Andrew Lewman, co-founder of the Tor Project, Ollama runs 7 to 20 times faster in GPU mode versus CPU mode. For anyone running a local AI server on their LAN, that difference is the ballgame.

RLC+ is free, binary-compatible with Enterprise Linux, and available as ISOs, KVM images, cloud images for AWS, Azure, and GCP, container images, and bootc images.

Read the full post on CIQ: Why RLC+

This kind of tiered product explainer is a good test of whether you actually understand the product well enough to explain who it is for and why the upgrade is worth it without making it sound like a sales pitch.