This PR implements an in-place upgrade of Ansible after support for CentOS 7 was dropped in #4138. When reviewing our supported operating systems, the minimum Python we must support is Python 3.8 from Ubuntu 20.04. This imposes a set of version limits which can be summarized as:

• ansible-core 2.13
• ansible 6.x (which depends on ansible-core 2.13)

Ubuntu 20.04 itself will be EOL in 2 weeks on 30 May 2025. The a3-highgpu-8g solution still has dependencies upon Ubuntu 20.04, however, so we cannot immediately drop support for it. Once we transition the A3 High solution to a new OS, our new limit will be imposed by Debian 11 (Python 3.9).

To obtain support for Python 3.8 and above, we must install a newer version of Python in Rocky Linux 8 which includes Python 3.6 in a base installation. Rocky Linux 9 includes Python 3.9 by default, which should suffice, however this PR makes the affirmative choice to update Rocky Linux 8 and 9 to include Python 3.12 but retain Python 3.6 and 3.9 (respectively) as the default Python 3 interpeter for users. The reasoning behind this:

• The oldest supported release of Ansible requires Python 3.10 so this is a step we will need to take anyhow on both Rocky Linux 8+9
• Python 3.12 aligns with RedHat Enterprise Linux 10 which was released on 13 May 2025

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