CentOS Hyperscale Workstation Sees Experimental OS Builds, More Changes Coming

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing.

The CentOS Hyperscaler effort has been working on better fitting CentOS Stream to modern enterprise needs and via their repository working on things like backporting newer systemd versions and other key packages either as upgrades or what isn't currently found in CentOS/EPEL.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG today published their Q2'2021 progress report where they noted their most recent backport of systemd 248, a non-modular build of LLVM 12 is available until a modular version is offered as a CentOS Stream, and there is a DNF/RPM setup with Btrfs copy-on-write support. On the kernel front, the Hyperscale SIG is currently tracking the Linux 5.12 kernel for use on CentOS. The group has also added a modified version of KPatch for live kernel patching.

Perhaps most exciting this quarter is the CentOS Hyperscale group now publishing experimental OS images / Live DVDs of their CentOS Hyperscale wares pre-installed. That OS image is still rather primitive but they are making progress.

Looking ahead the hyperscalers are looking at making their live media image ready for broader consumption, integrating Btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature, Hyperscale-enabled cloud images, and enabling FSVERITY support within RPM.

Find out more about this interesting CentOS effort via the project's blog.