CentOS Hyperscale SIG Caps Off A Busy 2022

Established two years ago was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for a group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and other hyperscalers in making optional changes to CentOS Stream to better suit the Linux distribution to their internal needs.

The CentOS Hyperscale effort has now been going strong for two years in optimizing CentOS Stream for large scale infrastructure with more up-to-date packages, backing RPM Copy-on-Write functionality with Btrfs, and various other changes.

The special interest group has published their Q4'2022 report with some of the activities for the past quarter having included:

- They have been working on updating systemd for both CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Stream 9. Currently they are working on bringing systemd 252.4 out to CentOS Stream Hyperscale users.

- Hyperscale SIG members also continue work on their modified version of the Linux 5.14 kernel that is optimized for their usage.

- They have gained the ability to use KIWI for building operating system images through the CentOS Build System.

- Package updates have been made available for zsh, fish, iperf3, dmidecode, fio, dwarves, kpatch, linuxptp, and other newer packages over what is otherwise offered currently in CentOS Stream.

- Support for disabling select RPMs from using the RPM copy-on-write functionality.

- Documentation improvements and additions to their website.

- Planned work moving forward for the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is moving to a new OpenShift instance, using CBS for constructing their spin images, shipping an updated QEMU within EPEL, and integrating Btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature.

More details on this latest work around the CentOS Hyperscale SIG can be found via the CentOS.org blog.