Hyperscalers Have Been Making CentOS 9 Stream More Attractive With New Features

While many were upset by CentOS Linux 8 going premature EOL at the end of last year, for those that made the move to CentOS Stream there continues to be a love of moment in part by the recently establisher Hyperscale SIG. For CentOS Stream 9, the big hyperscalers have been working on some interesting additions/backporting to the platform.

Established one year ago with backing from the likes of Twitter and Facebook was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG. Engineers from these big tech companies have been working to provide optional back-ports and other new features atop CentOS (Stream) for what otherwise isn't readily available on that enterprise-aged software platform.

Besides back-porting some key components like newer systemd releases to CentOS, the hyperscalers also have been working on handling deprecated device support in some areas and working on their own customed workstation OS build.

CentOS Stream 9 on the desktop.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG today published their quarterly report for Q4'2021 where they noted some of the features they in turn were able to get into upstream CentOS Stream 9. Some of their contributions to CentOS Stream 9 itself was systemd-oomd as that Out of Memory Daemon found in the latest systemd releases, PipeWire and WirePlumber, Wayland support for the GNOME classic session, and upgraded SDL2 with GNOME Wayland support.

This special interest group remains active in handling the latest systemd releases and new features, updating their Zstd and LZ4 compression packages, kernel updates, DNF/RPM copy-on-write support in experimental form, and other feature work.

See the CentOS.org blog for the Q4'2021 Hyperscale SIG status report. The SIG is also planning a new hyperscale kernel build and Btrfs-enabled installer and user-space support, among other feature work backed by engineers at these big tech companies.