We are happy to announce the release of CentOS Linux 8! CentOS was created when Red Hat stopped providing RHEL for free. CentOS is a high-quality Linux distribution mostly used on servers. It provides complete control over its open-source software packages and is fully customized for research needs or for running a high-performance website, without the need for license fees. Let us see what’s new in CentOS 8.
CentOS Stream
The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a “rolling preview” of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases.
Wayland desktop
GNOME Shell has been rebased to version 3.28. The GNOME session and the GNOME Display Manager use Wayland as their default display server. The X.Org server, the default display server in RHEL 7, is also available.
Security and Firewall
The new default packet filtering framework is nftables, which replaces iptables. FirewallD will use nftables under the hood. OpenSSH has been rebased on version 7.8p1, this effectively removes SSH1 support. System-wide cryptographic policies are now applied by default. This means that the administrator will be able to specify security policies for a number of software such as Kerberos, IPSec, DNSSEC and TLS, all in one place.
Software management: RPM, DNF and AppStream
RPM, the RPM package manager, sees its first update in a while. RPM now checks the entire package for integrity rather than just the payload before installation. The RPM format now supports AppStream. YUM4 is the new package manager, based on DNF technology, it supersedes YUM3.
The real news is AppStream. AppStream introduces the “module” concept. Modules are user-space components that can be updated without updating the entire operating system. This allows software that receives frequent updates, such as PHP or Python, to be updated without relying on third-party repositories or waiting for the next major CentOS release. Modules will be available for languages, databases, and popular applications. You can have multiple versions of a single module installed and running simultaneously on the same operating system.
Important software and updates
Look, Ma, newer and better software for developing cool apps on CentOS Linux 8:
| Software | Version |
|---|---|
| Ansible | 2.8.0 |
| Apache | 2.4.37 |
| Emacs | 26.1 |
| Firefox | 60.xx |
| GIMP | 2.8.22 |
| GNOME | 3.28 |
| Golang | 1.11.13 |
| Libreoffice | 6.0.6.1 |
| Linux kernel | 4.18 |
| MariaDB | 10.3.11 |
| MySQL | 8 |
| Nano | 2.9.8 |
| Nginx | 1.14.1 |
| OpenSSH | 7.8p1 |
| Perl | 5.26 |
| PHP | 7.2.11 |
| PostgreSQL | 10.6 |
| Python | 2.7.15 |
| Python | 3.6.8 |
| rsyslog | 8.37.0 |
| Ruby | 2.5.3 |
| Rust | 1.35.0 |
| Scala | 2.10 |
| Squid | 4 |
| Subversion | 1.10 |
| Varnish | 6 |
| Vim | 8.0.1763 |
Removed security functionality
- shadow-utils no longer allows all-numeric user and group names
- Security is now disabled by default
- The Clevis HTTP pin has been removed
To learn more about the other removed security features, refer to the upstream documentation.
Known issues in CentOS 8
- If the user plans to install CentOS-8 in a VirtualBox guest, they should not select “Server with a GUI” (default) during installation.
- Support for some adapters has been removed in CentOS-8. ELRepo offers driver update disks (DUD) for some of those that are still commonly used. For the list of device IDs provided by the ELRepo packages, please see here.
- Once CentOS-8 is installed, you can use the CentOS Plus kernel (kernel-plus), which supports those devices.
- When using boot.iso and NFS to install, the automatic procedure to add the AppStream-Repo will fail. You have to disable it and manually add the correct NFS path.
To install and use CentOS 8 (1905), at least 2 GB of RAM is required. The community members recommend at least 4 GB of RAM for it to function smoothly.
To learn more about CentOS 8 in detail, read the CentOS wiki page.