Dear CentOS enthusiast,

As we approach the end of 2021, I wanted to thank all of you who have worked so hard this year towards the betterment of the project. This year we've made governance more transparent, welcomed several new SIGs, made big strides in consolidating infrastructure with Fedora where it made sense, and begun to return to in-person events. We could not have done this without the passion and hard work of the project community. Thank you.

Project News

CentOS Linux 8 End Of Life

Update 2022-02-01: These instructions no longer work since the packages were moved from the mirror network to the vault. See the CentOS 8 section of the CentOS Stream page for current instructions.

This is your final notice that CentOS Linux 8 reaches its end of life on December 31st. The CentOS Project recommends that you migrate your existing CentOS Linux 8 installations to CentOS Stream 8:

dnf swap centos-linux-repos centos-stream-repos
dnf distro-sync

And, of course, if you cannot, or do not wish to, use CentOS Stream, several rebuild projects have sprung up this year to fill that space.

CentOS Stream 9 Launch

The CentOS Project is delighted to announce the availability of CentOS Stream 9, the latest major release of the CentOS Stream distribution.

With CentOS Stream 9, you can influence the development of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 9 with patches, bug reports, and discussion. What goes into CentOS Stream 9 is an indication of what you’ll see in the next minor release of RHEL, so it’s a great way to get ahead of the game if you’re developing something for deployment on RHEL.

You can read more about CentOS Stream 9 in the announcement blog post and on the new centos.org/stream9 web page, which we intend to be an ongoing chronicle of what’s happening in that project.

New Website Design!

Along with the launch of CentOS Stream 9 last week, we are delighted to show you the new website design that the Artwork SIG, lead by Alain Delgado, has been working on this year. For the first time in years we have a unified theme across all of our important web properties, incuding centos.org, this blog, the mailing list archives, and will come to more of our websites over the coming weeks and months.

Board nominations and election timeline

The CentOS Board of Directors has one-year terms, with half of the terms expiring in February, and the other half in August, so that there’s always some experienced directors at any given time, in the unlikey event that all directors were to step down in a given term.

As such, we’re coming up on another Board term starting in February, and the call for nominations has been open for about a month, and in the January board meeting, the board will select the replacement for the two directors who have indicated that they will step down at the end of this term. Nominations are now closed, so that the directors can consider their options over the next few weeks.

We look forward to welcoming two new directors in the February board meeting, and introducing them to you.

EPEL 9 is now ready for developers to begin contributing

Carl George writes: “On behalf of the EPEL Steering Committee, I’m pleased to announce the availability of EPEL 9. This is the culmination of five months of work between the EPEL Steering Committee, the Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering team, and other contributors. Package maintainers can now request dist-git branches, trigger Koji builds, and submit Bodhi updates for EPEL 9 packages.” More details are on the Fedora community blog

Other community updates

• Brian Stinson provides information about Extras in CentOS Stream 9

• Shaun McCance talks about the work by the RHEL docs team to upstream the documentation

Events

Over the past few weeks we’ve been present at two events, where we had great conversations with users and developers of CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream.

SC21 - Supercomputing

SC21 was held in St. Louis at the end of November. We had the opportunity to talk with many universities and research organizations who are using CentOS, RHEL, and various other rebuilds, in their supercomputing infrastructure.

Also at the event, CentOS community members Neal Gompa and Davide Cavalca gave a presentation about the Hyperscale SIG, and SIGs in general, focusing on the opportunity to contribute to the entire Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

OLF (Ohio LinuxFest)

We were delighted to sponsor OLF last weekend, and talk with the Open/Libre/Free software enthusiasts of Central Ohio and surrounding areas.

The event, which was previously named Ohio LinuxFest, rebranded this year to Open/Libre/Free to reflect that it’s about so much more than just Linux. We were very pleased to see it come back to being an in-person event for its 19th year, and look forward to attending for many years to come.

FOSDEM + Dojo

FOSDEM has announced that they will be online again this year. And, as usual, we’ll be holding a CentOS Dojo on the day leading up to FOSDEM. This year, that means that it will be held February 3rd and 4th. The extra day is just so that we don’t have multiple tracks at the same time, and to be friendly to multiple time zones.

The Call for Presentations (CFP) is now open, and will be open until January 9th. (See the event page for details.)

SCaLE

We are tentatively planning to be present at the upcoming SCaLE in Pasadena, March 3-6 2022.

Event Recommendations/Requests

If you have an event that you’d like to recommend to us, please reach out to the CentOS-Promo mailing list to suggest it.

Also, if you would like to volunteer a location for an in-person CentOS Dojo in 2022, we would love to have some events at new places in the coming year.

SIG Reports

CentOS SIGs are smaller groups doing interesting things on top of the CentOS platform. If you’re looking at getting involved in CentOS, SIGs are usually the best place to get started. You can read more about SIGs at the new SIGs website, https://sigs.centos.org/

Each month, several of our SIGs report about what they’ve been up to for the past quarter.

Virtualization

Advanced Virtualization updates

• AV 8.5.0 packages have been built and already tagged as -release.
  This is the last build of AV on the SIG, as the AV program is now
  obsolete in favor of the regular RHEL stream.

oVirt updates

• oVirt is now moving the main development platform from
  gerrit.ovirt.org to github.com/oVirt (sbonazzo, 16:07:59)
• also moving automation from jenkins.ovirt.org to GitHub Actions
• merged pathces now are triggering builds in copr at
  https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ovirt/ovirt-master-snapshot/
• oVirt project is planning to release GA builds directly via CentOS
  Virtualization SIG
• it should make life easier for users and for other distributions
  already rebuilding CentOS Virtualization SIG repos
• major issues found so far: a huge amount of missing java libraries
  needed to build ovirt-engine and some issue building oVirt Node and
  oVirt Appliance
• but CentOS Community Build System should work fine once all the
  dependencies will be available
• oVirt project received contribution for building oVirt Engine on
  aarch64, patch is currently being reviewed
• some oVirt project developers are now collaborating with OKD
  Virtualization SIG too. Give OKD Virtualization or OKD on oVirt a
  run and let us know how it goes

any other business

• We are starting a new project to provide packages for Intel TDX in
  the SIG. Currently In early stages, we are still sorting out details
  about the development proceess
• Packages will be available in virt8s-tdx-devel

CentOS OpsTools SIG Quarterly Report

Sep 01, 2021 - Nov 30, 2021

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 lose any.

Activity

We’ve rebuilt the packages and dependencies for the OpenStack Collectd container for CentOS 9 Stream and CentOS 8 Stream.
Next is to update collectd to version 5.13, which will be released soon.

Issues for the board

Nothing to report.

Until next year …

And that’s a wrap for 2021. From the CentOS Project to you, we wish you a healthy and prosperous new year, and to those who are celebrating a holiday at this time of year, we hope you have a wonderful happy time with your friends and family. We’ll see you next year!