Centos 8 is EOL in 2021, what will xcp-ng do?

olivierlambert

What do you mean by "Xen" @Biggen ? Xen itself doesn't need any Linux distro.

You meant Citrix maybe?

Biggen

@olivierlambert Yup, I meant Citrix and whatever they call it now - XenServer.

olivierlambert

We'll have discussion with them to have think about the future

stormi

We have published a blog post about all this: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2020/12/17/centos-and-xcpng-future/

jefftee

@ieugen Read the blog post that XCP-NG posted today on this very topic, but even if the decided to stick with CentOS 8 Stream for the future base platform, they have selective control over which packages/updates would get released for XCP-NG.

I've already switched my CentOS 8.x installs to CentOS 8 Stream. Fedora is too buggy and too far upstream of RedHat for my personal taste. CentOS 8 Steam is supposed to be positioned between Fedora and RedHat, so they might just hit the sweet spot.

Of course, if XCP-NG switched to Ubuntu LTS releases as the base going forward, I wouldn't cry about that either, so I anticipate this announcement from RedHat won't really affect XCP-NG and we'll look back on this and realize it was not a big deal.

IndyJ

@jefftee I prefer Alpine Linux.

jefftee

@indyj ok

tuxen

@indyj said in Centos 8 is EOL in 2021, what will xcp-ng do?:

@jefftee I prefer Alpine Linux.

+1

Low resource footprint, no bloatware... They even have a pre-built Xen Hypervisor ISO flavor

olivierlambert

Xen and Linux kernel inside XCP-ng are completely custom, so it's pretty different than the those shipped in CentOS or even Alpine.

JohnnyBeGood

I've always used Debian LTS for many, many years. Just curious if Debian is anywhere on the radar for the replacement?

olivierlambert

The thing is: everything is RPM based now. Switching to DEB will involve a LOT of work (not only to rebuild everything, but also the build system, now based on Koji etc.)

Note: I like Debian and it's my main server operating system.

JohnnyBeGood

@olivierlambert said in Centos 8 is EOL in 2021, what will xcp-ng do?:

The thing is: everything is RPM based now. Switching to DEB will involve a LOT of work (not only to rebuild everything, but also the build system, now based on Koji etc.)

Note: I like Debian and it's my main server operating system.

Got it. Thanks!

olivierlambert

IMHO, CentOS Stream might do it, alternatively Rocky, but this will be probably a "common" decision with Citrix so we can keep our fork small and contribute to each project easily (and move faster!)

JohnnyBeGood

@olivierlambert said in Centos 8 is EOL in 2021, what will xcp-ng do?:

IMHO, CentOS Stream might do it, alternatively Rocky, but this will be probably a "common" decision with Citrix so we can keep our fork small and contribute to each project easily (and move faster!)

I forgot about Citrix. In that case it makes sense to work together. Anything else is double work

olivierlambert

Indeed, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. We always prefer to work together, there's too many things to do

goolux

Any news what will happened here?

olivierlambert

CentOS 7 will continue to be supported with patches and so on up to June the 30th 2024, so it's not really a priority as we speak. But I'm sure the topic will be discussed during the next Xen summit in June

cdbessig

Any updates here? We're 8 months away and its worrisome installing new nodes with less than 1 year lifetime.

olivierlambert

As I already explained in different places, what matters is the hypervisor, kernel, OVS and such important packages. We can still backport security fixes ourselves on various packages inside the OS.

XCP-ng is only partially based on CentOS, only using non-critical CentOS packages (NOT the kernel, NOT Xen, NOT OVS, SMAPI/XAPI aren't packaged in CentOS etc.).

XCP-ng is NOT your regular distro, it's an appliance where we backport relevant security fixes.

Be sure that next major version won't even have SSH access enabled by default.