[CentOS-announce] Announcing the latest release of CentOS Linux 8 (2111)

Tue Nov 16 13:25:23 UTC 2021
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

Release for CentOS Linux 8 (2111)

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the latest
version of CentOS Linux 8. Effectively immediately, this is the
current release for CentOS Linux 8 and is tagged as 2111, derived
from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 Source Code.

**PLEASE NOTE:**  CentOS Linux 8 will EOL on 31 December 2021.  We
will handle the EOL as directed by the CentOS Project Board of
Directors and detailed here:

https://www.centos.org/centos-linux-eol/

As always, read through the Release Notes at:
http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS8.2111 
<http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS8.2105>   - these notes
contain important information about the release and details about some
of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes
are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from
users.

Remember, you should not be using CentOS Linux 8 in production or you
should have a plan to migrate to a different Operating System before
31 December 2021. We will only be doing updates as detailed in the above
EOL link.

----------
Updates, Sources, and DebugInfos

Updates released since the upstream release are all posted, across all
architectures. We strongly recommend every user apply all updates,
including the content released today, on your existing CentOS Linux 8
machine by just running 'dnf update'.

As with all CentOS Linux 8 components, this release was built from
sources hosted at git.centos.org. Sources will be available from
vault.centos.org in their own dedicated directories to match the
corresponding binary RPMs.

Since there is far less traffic to the CentOS source RPMs compared with
the binary RPMs, we are not putting this content on the main mirror
network. If users wish to mirror this content they can do so using the
reposync command available in the yum/dnf-utils package. All CentOS
source RPMs are signed with the same key used to sign their binary
counterparts. Developers and end users looking at inspecting and
contributing patches to the CentOS Linux distro will find the
code hosted at git.centos.org far simpler to work against. Details on
how to best consume those are documented along with a quick start at:
http://wiki.centos.org/Sources

Debuginfo packages have been signed and pushed. Yum configs
shipped in the new release file will have all the context required for
debuginfo to be available on every CentOS Linux install.

This release supersedes all previously released content for CentOS
Linux 8, and therefore we highly encourage all users to upgrade their
machines. Information on different upgrade strategies and how to
handle stale content is included in the Release Notes.

Note that older content, obsoleted by newer versions of the same
applications are trim'd off from repos like extras/ and centosplus/

----------
Download

We produced the following installer images for CentOS Linux 8

# CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-boot.iso: 827326464 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-boot.iso) = 
9602c69c52d93f51295c0199af395ca0edbe35e36506e32b8e749ce6c8f5b60a

# CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-dvd1.iso: 10794041344 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-x86_64-dvd1.iso) = 
3b795863001461d4f670b0dedd02d25296b6d64683faceb8f2b60c53ac5ebb3e

# CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-boot.iso: 789970944 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-boot.iso) = 
1aab48198031ce8ea2fed9341fb9d28a5846bb1e25f0ffd480111a006fcdf374

# CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-dvd1.iso: 9282007040 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-ppc64le-dvd1.iso) = 
11998564c8f5d18b765c7eace6c02e5891417388ba379cec0ce360af7cea7c7c

# CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-boot.iso: 745474048 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-boot.iso) = 
ea75b9ab34f8fd636f8c32d5d7b56ede9c6a3b721cdf3057a15ab8927b996c60

# CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-dvd1.iso: 8215996416 bytes
SHA256 (CentOS-8.5.2111-aarch64-dvd1.iso) = 
146e58624ef3b8842fc9576d9c5b9c046497601b1a0636f934484b0b1929ce21

Information for the torrent files and sums are available at
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/isos/

----------
Getting Help

The CentOS ecosystem is sustained by community driven help and
guidance. The best place to start for new users is at
http://wiki.centos.org/GettingHelp

We are also on social media, you can find the project:
on Twitter at  :http://twitter.com/CentOS
on Facebook at :https://www.facebook.com/groups/centosproject/
on LinkedIn at :https://www.linkedin.com/groups/22405

And you will find the core team and a majority of the contributors on
irc, on irc.libera.chat in #centos ; talking about the finer points of
distribution engineering and platform enablement.

----------
Contributors

This release was made possible due to the hard work of many people,
foremost on that list are the Red Hat Engineers for producing a great
distribution and the CentOS QA team, without them CentOS Linux would
look very different. Many of the team went further and beyond
expectations to bring this release to you, and I would like to thank
everyone for their help.

We are also looking for people to get involved with the QA process in
CentOS, if you would like to join this please introduce yourself on
the centos-devel list
(http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel).

Finally, please join me in thanking the donors who all make this
possible for us.

CentOS Linux 7 will be available and maintained until 2024 and CentOS
Stream 8 will also be maintained until that time.  Here is how CentOS
Stream is different from CentOS Linux as and EOL information:

https://www.centos.org/cl-vs-cs/

Here is how you can move a machine from CentOS Linux 8 to CentOS
Stream 8:

https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/

In closing, this release is very bittersweet for me.  I have been
involved in the CentOS Linux process and have done the vast majority
of releases since the 2004.  Moving forward, I will be working as
hard as I can to make sure CentOS Stream is the best it can be.

It has been a wild ride, thanks for the memories.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes