CentOS Hyperscale SIG Continues Adapting CentOS Stream For Large Scale Infrastructure

Established last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG as a special interest group with the backing of Facebook and Twitter among other hyperscalers in providing updated packages and other optional modifications to CentOS Stream to make the distribution more practical for use within their large-scale infrastructure environments.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG has been making improvements around updated systemd and other packages, Btrfs integration enhancements, and other changes geared for hyperscalers. The special interest group today published their Q2'2022 status report to outline recent and planned activities for the group. Some of the work this past quarter included:

- Improving the SIG's documentation so it's more inviting and useful to users.

- Updating against systemd 250.3 for both CentOS Stream 8 and 9. They are currently preparing as well to move to systemd 251.2.

- Btrfs-progs from 5.16.2 was pulled in for CentOS Stream 8/9 and adding the "compsize" utility from Fedora into the SIG experimental repository.

- An updated Kpatch package back-ported from upstream in order to fix bugs.

- Updated backports of their Trusted Platform Module (TPM) stack for CentOS Stream 8/9 with that stack based on what's in Fedora.

- Re-basing their DNF/RPM stack with copy-on-write (CoW) support atop the latest upstream changes.

Among the features the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is looking at moving forward is providing an updated QEMU package in EPEL, integrating Btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature, and beginning to publish hyperscale spin images of CentOS Strean 9.

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