Take a look at Oracle's "CentOS to Oracle Linux" (and other similar) scripts to see how they work and what they do (sorry, I don't have a link handy as I'm on a

Take a look at Oracle's "CentOS to Oracle Linux" (and other similar) scripts to see how they work and what they do (sorry, I don't have a link handy as I'm on a mobile device at the moment). If memory serves, the process consists of, basically, installing the <distro>-release package for the "new" distro (which includes the files in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ (or whatever) directory that defines the package repositories), enabling the repositories it just added, disabling the "old" distribution's repositories, then running a "yum update" to replace the "old" distributions packages (including the kernel) with the (nearly identical) ones from the "new" distribution. After all that is done, you reboot the host so that the new kernel is loaded and that's pretty much it. Mostly out of curiosity, I tried out Oracle's "centos2ol.sh" (or something like that) script ~8 years ago on a new CentOS 6 VM I had set up for just that purpose and it was as easy as they claim that it is. I don't recall encountering any issues and I suspect that, by now, they've ran into most of the potential issues and have devised ways to resolve them automatically. Note that while CentOS 8 is a clone of RHEL 8, the CentOS packages are rebuilt versions of the RHEL ones. Most of them are built from the exact same source code but some packages do have minor changes made to them before they are rebuilt (for trademarks, etc.).