CentOS Community Newsletter, June 2021

Tuesday, 8, June 2021 Rich Bowen Newsletter No Comments

(Yes, we're a little late this month. Sorry about that.)

Dear CentOS Enthusiasts,

Here's what's happening around the CentOS community lately.

CentOS Linux 8.4 Released

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the latest version of CentOS Linux 8. Effective immediately, this is the current release for CentOS Linux 8 and is tagged as 2105, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Source Code. More details are available at https://blog.centos.org/2021/06/centos-linux-8-2105-released/

CentOS Stream Q&A at LISA '21

At the recent USENIX/LISA conference, Mike McGrath and Gunnar Hellekson hosted a Q&A session for discussion of what's happening in CentOS Stream, and other related topics around the CentOS community. The video is available on YouTube, and we welcome your further questions, which you can bring to any of our mailing lists or other public forums.

Topics discussed include proposed special interest groups (SIGs), the downstream rebuild projects, the various Free RHEL offerings, and many other things.

IRC Moving To Libera.Chat

Due to recent changes in the management of the Freenode IRC network, the CentOS project has decided to move our IRC presence off of Freenode over to the new Libera.chat network. The CentOS community continues to maintain a number of IRC channels for simple text-based discussion of a variety of topics around the project.

There are many IRC clients available, or, if you prefer, you can connect with the web client which Libera provides.

CPE Is Hiring

The Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short, is the Red Hat team combining IT and release engineering from Fedora and CentOS. Our goal is to keep core servers and services running and maintained, build releases, and other strategic tasks that need more dedicated time than volunteers can give.

CPE is hiring new talent to come work full time on Fedora and CentOS. You can read more details in their blog post, (two of the positions are already filled) or apply directly here:

LATAM-based Associate / Engineer level, perfect for someone new to the industry or someone early in their career. We are looking for an infrastructure focused hire.

SIGs

Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are probably the most exciting part of the CentOS project, where people come together to do interesting things on top of the CentOS platform. There's been a lot of SIG activity in recent months, with new SIGs being proposed and approved.

SIG Process Review

Over the last few weeks we have been collecting feedback from SIG participants about the existing SIG process, and ways that we can improve it and make it more transparent and accessible to a wider audience.

The notes from that exercise are in THIS blog post, and will be the basis of some policy rewriting that the Community Architect will be doing over the coming months. If you're interested in being involved in that process, please watch the centos-devel mailing list for more information once that process starts.

Virtualization SIG

- upstream released 4.4.6 based on CentOS Stream 8

- oVirt within VIrt SIG released builds to CentOS Stream repos

- oVirt Spring 2021 survey results available: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RcSzRQ2YmB2U3MNlWk0YqTVFdGYIdguk46K2A-DZEvc/viewanalytics showing good adoption of CentOS Stream and growing interest in new distributions based on RHEL 8.

OpsTools SIG

Purpose

Provide tools and documentation, recommendation and best practices for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

Sadly, we did not attract new volunteers to contribute to the SIGs purposes, but at the same time, we didn't loose any.

Activity

After initial euphoria setting up the SIG and getting to work, we can now observe a kind of settlement. We are still working on the upgrade of collectd to version 5.12. At the same time, and a bit related, collectd upstream has a CI issue we can not fix at the moment. Thus, there was a mirror organisation created and work is ongoing to establish a working CI there.

There is also an interest in investigating in loki as tool to allow multi-tenant log aggregation.

Following the lead of the CentOS project itself, we have switched our IRC channel over to libera.chat.

Issues for the board

Nothing to report.

Proposed: Kmods SIG

There's a proposal for a kmods SIG that will come before the Board of Directors next month. The proposal is now in the wiki, and available for your comments.

The kmods SIG will focus on providing kernel modules currently not available in CentOS Stream. If you have comments about the proposal, or want to volunteer to be involved, please bring your comments to the thread on the centos-devel mailing list.

New: CentOS Stream Feature Request SIG

In the May Board meeting, the CentOS Stream Feature Request SIG was approved, and they had their first meeting to discuss how things are going to work. The SIG exists to serve as a gate for feature requests that are first developed in CentOS Stream from contributors who wish to request these features to be included in future RHEL releases.

If you are interested in being involved in this SIG, or if you have changes that you are interested in getting in to either CentOS Stream or future RHEL releases, plan to attend the next meeting, which will be at 16:00 UTC on Tuesdays.

Rebuild Community News

Our friends in the Alma project recently announced their AlmaLinux OS 8.4 release.

And you can read the news from the Rocky Linux project HERE.

Get Swag

Want CentOS swag? We've got shirts at HelloTux, and caps and shirts at the Red Hat Cool Stuff Store.