Introduction
Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, we’ve been waiting for a new version of CentOS. And, of course, it’s no surprise that Karanbir Singh worked on it, and, on the official mailing list, announced the release of CentOS Linux 7.
What’s new
As stated in this launch message, “updates released since we froze the iso and install media content are posted in the updates repo along with the release. This will include content from late November 2016 and December 2016, therefore anyone running a new install is highly encouraged to run a ‘yum update’ operation immediate on install completion. You can apply all updates, including the content released today, on your existing CentOS Linux 7/x86_64 machine by just running ‘yum update'”.
Some important updates:
- Support for the 7th-generation Core i3, i5, and i7 Intel processors and I2C on 6th-generation Core Processors
- Various packages have been rebased. Some of those are samba, squid, systemd, krb5, gcc-libraries, binutils, gfs-utils, libreoffice, GIMP,SELinux, firewalld, libreswan, tomcat and open-vm-tools
- SHA2 supported by OpenLDAP
- ECC-support added to OpenJDK-8, PerlNet:SSLeay and PerlIO::Socket::SSL
- Bluetooth LE is now supported
- Technology Preview: Among others support of Btrfs, OverlayFS, CephFS, DNSSEC, kpatch, the Cisco VIC and usNIC kernel driver, nested virtualization with KVM and multi-threaded xz compression with rpm-builds
The team recommends using torrents for downloading the new ISO (tagged as 1611), in order to preserve bandwith on official mirrors.
Link for downloading a Minimal ISO: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1611.torrent
So, it’s time to upgrade!
