CentOS Community Newsletter, August 2021

Dear CentOS enthusiast, thanks for joining us for another month's community newsletter.

Top news

There’s a lot going on on the CentOS community lately. Here are some of the highlights.

CentOS Linux 8 EOL

You are likely already aware that CentOS Linux 8 will reach end of life (EOL) on December 31, 2021. However, we still encounter people that are hearing this for the first time, so expect to see this announcement at the top of the rest of the newsletters this year.

We have also written a short document which covers some of the details as to what, exactly, happens when the EOL date is reached, and we encourage you to read that, and check back again over the coming months for further detail.

Automotive SIG

In the July Board of Directors meeting, the new Automotive SIG (Special Interest Group) was approved, and has begun their work.

You can read more about the mission of this SIG in the wiki, and find out how you can get involved, if this is an area that interests you.

Meet the new directors

In June two new directors were selected, and they became an official part of the Board in the July meeting.

A few weeks ago, they each took some time to chat with me, and talk about what they hope to accomplish on the Board in the coming year(s):

• Davide Cavalca interview
• Josh Boyer intervew

Public board meetings

In our ongoing effort to make CentOS governance more open and transparent, Board of Director meetings will be public, startin with the August meeting. If you are interested in attending the meeting, please watch the centos-devel mailing list for the meeting invite, and instructions for getting on the call.

Video news summaries

In June, I tried out doing a video edition of the newsletter, and got some positive feedback, so I’m going to try to make this a regular thing.

• June update
• July update

Subscribe to our channel on YouTube to catch the August update some time in the next few days!

Events

October 2021 Online Dojo

We will be holding our third online Dojo of 2021 October 7th and 8th (assuming we get enough submissions).

Details are in the wiki.

The call for presentations (CFP) is now open.

We are looking for presentations about CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream, CentOS SIG work, any work in the CentOS community, or any project you’re running on top of CentOS distributions.

Presentations will be delivered live, using the Hopin online conference platform. Presentations will be 40 minutes, including any Q&A time you want to have.

The CFP will close at 00:01 on September 6th.

Back on the road

In-person conferences are slowly starting to reappear on the calendar, and here’s a few where we expect to have a presence:

• Open Source Summit North America, Seattle, Washington, USA. September 27-30
• All Things Open, Raleigh, NC, USA. October 17-19
• SC21, St. Louis, MO, USA. November 14-19

None of these are guaranteed, yet, but we’ll be updating you in the coming months as our plans become more solid. (We hope!)

SIG reports

SIGs are communities building additional things on top of the various CentOS variants. These SIGs report quarterly on their progress. This month we have the following reports.

Cloud SIG

The Cloud SIG has provided their quarterly report on the CentOS Blog.

Storage SIG

Package updates:

• glusterfs updates to glusterfs-8.5 and glusterfs-9.3.
• ceph updates to ceph-14.2.22, ceph-15.2.13, and ceph-16.2.5
  • ceph-15.2.14 likely by the time you read this.
• nfs-ganesha and libntirpc to libntirpc-3.5 and nfs-ganesha-3.5.

CentOS Stream 8:

• glusterfs, ceph, and nfs-ganesha+libntirpc are all now built for CentOS Stream 8 in addition to CentOS 8.
• I see that cephadm has been built for 8 Stream too.

CentOS Stream 9:

• Waiting for build targets and the rest of the pieces necessary to start building glusterfs, ceph, and nfs-ganesha for CentOS Stream 9. See issue 313. The packages are all buildable (i.e. I have actually built them) on my CentOS Stream 9 box.

Misc:

• cephadm subpackage was unbundled from ceph to support ceph’s upstream CI facility. Francesco Pantano (fmount) builds the cephadm package.
  • The OpenStack upstream CI is going to promote Ceph pacific v16.2.5 with the related cephadm version, resulting in being feature parity with ceph-ansible, which is no longer distributed for the Pacific branch
• Some of us have learned, somewhat belatedly, that it is now possible to do builds from the lookaside. glusterfs, ceph, libntirpc, and nfs-ganesha packages have all been respun using the lookaside.

Messaging SIG

Purpose

Provide a unique source for messaging related packages. These packages are consumed e.g by the Cloud SIG or the OpsTools SIG.

Membership Update

No change during the past quarter.

Activity

The next goal for the Messagging SIG is to enable and build packages based on CentOS Stream 8 (and 9, once that becomes a thing).

Issues for the Board

There are no issues to bring to the board’s attention.

Press mentions

The press has been talking about us a lot in the past month! Here’s just a sampling of the articles that we’ve seen about the CentOS Project recently.

• Planning the CentOS 8 endgame (LWN)

• CentOS Stream: ‘I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,’ says Rocky Linux founder (The Register)

• CentOS In Your Car? Automotive SIG Approved
  (Phoronix)

• Remote Workstations for the Discerning Artists (Netflix Tech Blog)

Get Swag

If you’re looking for CentOS swag, we recommend our friends at HelloTux who have a variety of CentOS logo wear.

Until next time ...

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