The release of the distribution kit CentOS 2111 is presented, which has absorbed the changes from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5. The distribution is fully binary compatible with RHEL 8.5. CentOS 2111 builds are prepared (8 GB DVD and 600 MB netboot) for x86_64, Aarch64 (ARM64), and ppc64le architectures. The SRPMS packages from which the binaries are built and debuginfo are available through vault.centos.org.
In addition to the new features introduced in RHEL 8.5, CentOS 2111 changes the contents of 34 packages, including anaconda, dhcp, firefox, grub2, httpd, kernel, PackageKit, and yum. The changes made to the packages, as a rule, come down to rebranding and replacing the artwork. Removed RHEL-specific packages such as redhat-*, insights-client and subscription-manager-migration*. As in RHEL 8.5 for CentOS 8.5, additional AppStream modules have been formed with new versions of OpenJDK 17, Ruby 3.0, nginx 1.20, Node.js 16, PHP 7.4.19, GCC Toolset 11, LLVM Toolset 12.0.1, Rust Toolset 1.54.0 and Go Toolset 1.16.7.
This is the last release of the 8.x branch, which will be replaced by a continuously updated edition of the CentOS Stream distribution at the end of the year. Updates for CentOS Linux 8 will end on December 31st. On or before January 31, if critical vulnerabilities are found, content related to the CentOS Linux 8 branch will be removed from the mirrors and moved to the vault.centos.org archive.
Users are encouraged to migrate to CentOS Stream 8 by installing the centos-release-stream package ("dnf install centos-release-stream") and running the "dnf update" command. Alternatively, users can also switch to distributions that continued the development of the CentOS 8 branch: AlmaLinux (migration script), Rocky Linux (migration script), VzLinux (migration script) or Oracle Linux (migration script). In addition, Red Hat has made it possible (migration script) to use RHEL free of charge in open source organizations and individual developer environments with up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru