Re: [bitfolk] Where do current CentOS users want to go after CentOS 8 EOL?

Hello, As you may or may not be aware, CentOS 8's EOL is 31 December 2021, i.e. just over 2 months from now. After that date, Red Hat expects CentOS 8 users to switch to CentOS 8 Stream or to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux product. At the moment BitFolk supports the self-install of CentOS 8 and that is going to be in-place upgradeable to CentOS 8 Stream. And that's it. That is the current extent of your choices for RHEL-like. If you're a current CentOS 8 user what do you think you're going to want to be using after it goes EOL? It seems likely that there will be demand for CentOS 8 Stream and later Stream releases, so we'll continue supporting those as best we can¹. RHEL itself is now free for use on up to 16 production systems, as long as you sign up with Red Hat for an Individual Developer subscription: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-progra… https://developers.redhat.com/rhel8 We don't currently support the install of that, but if people want it then we would. You install it like CentOS and then have to put in your subscription details once it's booted. The same change of installer and kernel would be necessary since it sees unlikely that Red Hat are going to back down from disabling everything except KVM. That does mean that you may not be able to get Red Hat to provide you with any support ("come back when it's booted using our kernel"). As far as CentOS replacement projects go, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux have come to my attention. They aren't currently supported but could be. They don't intend to drift much from RHEL's settings so they will also require alternate installers and kernels. Oracle Linux's installer and kernel continues to support Xen, it is free for use (charges for support) and otherwise aims to be binary-compatible with RHEL, like CentOS did. I get a little bit sick in my own mouth at the idea of working with Oracle, but if there's paying customers who don't then we will enable that. So what do you CentOS users want to do? Cheers, Andy ¹ Red Hat goes out of their way to disable other virtualisation methods than their own product, KVM. This means that you can't currently install or run CentOS/RHEL 8 or later under Xen using their packaged installer or kernel. It is only possible using the third party kernel-ml package. Red Hat are the only major Linux vendor to take this stance and as such we can't promise to always be able to go against their intentions. https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2021/02/03/booting-the-centosrhel-install… -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting