CentOS Hyperscale SIG Backported Newer Systemd, Preps For Experimental Repo

Approved at the start of the year was the CentOS Hyperscaler special interest group that is working to cater CentOS Stream so it's more suitable by the likes of Facebook and Twitter along with other modern enterprises. The SIG just issued their Q1'2021 report about what they accomplished in this first quarter of being an approved effort and what work remains on the table.

The SIG is maintaining the "Hyperscale" repository where their package back-ports and other work is landing. During Q1 they provided a systemd 247 package based on Fedora's packaging to ship a newer systemd than what is otherwise available on CentOS 8. The Hyperscale SIG also added grep 3.6 for its faster performance and bug fixes, legacy-enabled iptables support, MTR 0.94, Dwarves 1.20, and also moving to a newer Meson and Ninja-Build.

The project is still planning to setup a Hyperscale "experimental" repository where they will test new changes like copy-on-write support, Btrfs-based atomic updates, and more. The group also plans to back-port libvirt from Fedora to CentOS, and increase collaboration with the CentOS Cloud SIG.

More details on the CentOS Hyperscale efforts via the CentOS blog.