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CentOS Linux 7 will reach EOL on Sunday

149 points by fh973 2y ago

TMWNN 2y ago
I chose Centos Stream 8 over Centos 8 because I figured that the stream version's rolling updates would result in a later EOL. When Red Hat announced the unexpectedly short EOL for 8 I was glad for my choice. That said, what has Red Hat said about an EOL for Stream, if any?
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Stream 8 is already EOL: https://blog.centos.org/2023/04/end-dates-are-coming-for-centos-stream-8-and-centos-linux-7/ https://blog.centos.org/2023/04/end-dates-are-coming-for-cen...
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    D'oh! Thanks for the heads up.
    - rwmj 2y ago
      You can use LEAPP to move to CS9: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/leapp-explained-detail https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/leapp-explained-detail
      - justinclift 2y ago
        Heh Heh Heh "LEAPP" is an interesting name choice, in that one of SUSE's distro's is called "Leap". Wonder if there are trademark issues around that? LEAPP seems like it's been around for a few years now, so probably nothing serious.
- dralley 2y ago
  CentOS Stream has a 5-year lifecycle. Support ends when the full support (prior to maintenance support) period of the corresponding RHEL release ends.
authun 2y ago
There are so many alternatives to CentOS and RHEL that their absence is inconsequential.
- major505 2y ago
  Just curious. What are you guys using in place of centos? This days, ny servers are all debian or ubuntu server based.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    CentOS Stream
  - RedShift1 2y ago
    AlmaLinux user here, happy with it, everything works.
    - dfedbeef 2y ago
      +1 Alma is great. I've interacted less with Rocky but both projects have great teams behind them, and both have a clear mission and promise to their users.
      - gepiti 2y ago
        +2 The transition was very smooth
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Debian 12, after a period of using Ubuntu that ended when Canonical decided to put advertising in the friggin cli. Oh, and pushing snap, but the advertising is what really nailed it for me. ;)
    - Algent 2y ago
      I realy like debian but is there any equivalent to yum ? It did some really nice advanced stuff I don't think you can replicate with apt. The shell mode avoided me some really big trouble several times (erlang updates often made me uninstall anything using it on update). Current job doesn't give me many chances to use linux rn so I'm a bit out of touch. Recently took a look at rocky and it felt like a centos. also tried ubuntu but I recall I had to remove some ads package yeah.
justinclift 2y ago
Directly relevant: https://techstrongitsm.com/itsm-news/suse-offers-lifeline-to-stranded-centos-users-with-liberty-linux-lite/ https://techstrongitsm.com/itsm-news/suse-offers-lifeline-to... All they need to do, SUSE’s GM of the Business Critical Linux team, Rick Spencer, said, is simply change their CentOS 7 update repository to SUSE’s, avoiding any disruptive migrations or upgrades. HN article about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732016
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Yeah. It's super ironic. ;)
    - BSDobelix 2y ago
      It absolutely is, kind of unreal ;)
      - ghaff 2y ago
        It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.
        justinclift 2y ago
        In hindsight I wish I'd told KB "No, don't do it" at the meeting prior to them joining. :/
otagekki 2y ago
Transitioning from CentOS 7 to RedHat 8 and 9 at my former company's private cloud has smooth for most teams, pareto-style, with 80% of migration-related incidents caused by the 20% of the teams that did some really weird changes to the VM's OS that was no longer allowed under RHEL 8 or 9. At first, I thought it was just to reduce the complexity of managing hardening rules for several OS and OS versions.
- p_l 2y ago
  It's a big issue for companies that have substantial deployment of CentOS7... and FedRAMP or similar clientele.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    It's a very big issue for scientific clusters which depend on CentOS, too. We'll find a way, though.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Scientific clusters have more options though, as Rocky/Alma and other alternatives to RHEL are available without dealing with "this distro does not ship FIPS-140-3 certified crypto" or similar.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Yes, that's true. However, tons of software was written solely for CentOS, so ironing out the small kinks will take some time. The problem is, scientific software can silently error out in many ways (like slightly lost accuracy), and detecting and fixing those will take some time. Considering some of these tools are developed over (almost two) decades, there's a lot of verification we have to go through.
        p_l 2y ago
        Considering how many interesting issues that specific CentOS7-locked job had just with updating kernel to latest LTS (which required a lot of fun stuff as well, given that it didn't compile with included GCC)... ... I can imagine.
INTPenis 2y ago
Just a heads up, since I couldn't comment on the LWP article about this a few days ago. The leapp-upgrade program had a reproducible bug as late as last week where after every upgrade it inserted net.ifnames=0 into the kernel cmdline. So when the new RHEL 8 system booted up it was using the wrong interface names (eth). The fix was simply grubby --remove-args="net.ifnames=0" --update-kernel ALL but felt stupid since RH emphasize the interface name change and then they themselves sabotage it for us.
dncornholio 2y ago
This has been a huge shitshow for us. Migration has been such a pain for our VPS boxes, so that we just spooled up new instances on AlmaLinux and migrated data by hand. It was a long week.
- quantumfissure 2y ago
  Disaster for us too, not VPS but VMs on-prem.
nijave 2y ago
I used ELevate for a few VMs at home and it worked pretty well. I upgraded from Centos 7 to Alma 9 one release at a time https://almalinux.org/elevate/ https://almalinux.org/elevate/
- cpach 2y ago
  That looks very useful. Thank you for linking!
javier_e06 2y ago
We experienced a migration from CentOS7 to Rocky 8. Rocky 8 running on VirtulBox produces different results on some numerical tools compared with Docker container. CentOS 7 did not use to have that problem. Same program and floating point differences. Other than that Rocky 8 ran all right.
quantumfissure 2y ago
I'm always amazed and envious at how many successes people have had with the conversions. This has been a huge problem for me and I only have just about 75 boxes. Only about 15 or so have been converted successfully to RHEL 7.9 since March, none (successfully) to 8.x after that. 1. Convert2rhel has been a nightmare, only a few have worked properly the first time. I've had 8 tickets opened with Redhat. Once I get one working, the next one will fail with different problems. 2. LEAPP from 7.9 to 8.9 hasn't worked successfully yet. When it does it breaks absolutely everything from PHP to mail sending to databases. 3. I thought Alma might solve the problem, nope. Similar issues as point number 2. Or I get Python errors, or any variety of anything else. I'm not sure what our path is going to be (maybe Tuxcare or Suse or something), but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster. The anxiety is high.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster. Your boss should understand this, if you are a medium sized company with highly configured boxes (pet style) and have to change major versions, crazy stuff always happens, I can tell you story's (especially firmware and blob related but also cronjobs, "optimized"-shell scripts, to really old php stuff and so on) about upgrades that will drive you to the church before you touch any "dnf upgrade", however that's why i tend for much shorter upgrade times (within 3-5 years). Customer had highly customized RHEL7 boxes, upgrade to 8 was "terror inducing", and went so far to rebuild nearly the whole infra (about 20 boxes but with really excellent documentation). You are not alone.
- eraser215 2y ago
  Is the problem ultimately to do with your configurations on your centos 7 boxes? Converting to rhel should be easy if you aren't doing anything that red hat wouldn't support in rhel.
  - quantumfissure 2y ago
    Yeah, I thought so too (since they're only moving from COS signed to RH signed), but it's hard to describe. I've had everything from proxy issues; to python; to PHP-fpm breaking after the upgrade. It's just a constant flood of 1 step forward 3 back. Some from random gremlins. For example, last week I wanted to try a test conversion of a box to Alma linux and it worked fine, but broke PHP, so I had to revert the snapshot. This week, the analysis blows up completely, despite nothing changing on the box. And that's just dev systems, I have zero confidence to move any prod systems.
AHTERIX5000 2y ago
What a mess. Centos Stream 8 seemed to work at first but then after upgrade to 9 secure boot didn't work at all, I couldn't even boot the 9 install media.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Secure boot seems very problematic with stream 9. I was looking at their shim signing approval and it seemed like it wasn't there yet. IMO, Stream is just there for testing and no one cares if it works or not.
bluedino 2y ago
Companies like CIQ, OpenLogic, and TuxCare offer extended support for CentOS 7, and Red Hat offers services for RHEL7. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/10/2256230/red-hat-and-ciq-offer-extend-support-for-rhel-7-and-centos-7 https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/10/2256230/red-hat-an...
hypeatei 2y ago
Unrelated, but any major OS version change these days feels contrived and unnecessary. What is changing so drastically that we need a major version bump and hours of upgrading? IMO, the versioning should follow a pattern of 2024.01, 2025.03, etc.. and updates should be seamless.
- dralley 2y ago
  Enterprise linux distributions pin package versions through the entire "major" release. They get security backports and often feature backports (for the first few years) but nothing which would change an API or ABI - for 10+ years. As such, the answer to your question is "pretty much everything". Wildly different kernel, libraries, etc. In theory it would be nice to roll upgrades like you suggest, but there are huge swathes of industry for which it's not a practical solution.
  - eraser215 2y ago
    ... And we all know that rolling upgrades frequently introduce breaking changes that don't make sense for enterprise environments. To your (great) point: Customers pay companies like red hat for software stability, both in how it works and how their software interfaces to it.
throwaway992673 2y ago
I stopped trusting CentOS dates and assumed CentOS 7 was EOL a long time ago because their yum repos were down, or they didn't provide certain updates anymore, or something. I noticed inconsistencies across machines I tried to update simultaneously, noticed there wasn't a common update point available (the machines were on slightly different versions to begin with), and decided it was junk and time to move on.
- dralley 2y ago
  You're sure that's not simply a matter of the client-side caching having expired on some machines (thus reaching out again for updates) vs. not having expired on other machines (thus not checking the repo a second time)? Alternatively maybe they were hitting different mirrors. But in either case, that's not an issue with the distribution.
  - throwaway992673 2y ago
    Oh yes, I checked caching, checked that the URLs were official by comparing them to the URLs CentOS canonically suggested, checked that the URLs did include security update repos, definitely dove into commands for "force check updates" type commands and the kernel rpms just weren't there. Old ones, new ones, nothing. Now I could have made a mistake, and according to the article text CentOS 7 "isn't EOL yet" so if someone has a mirror that does work I'd be interested to see evidence that kernel updates are even available. I'm not checking myself though, I don't trust Oracle enough to risk spending time standing up a CentOS 7 machine.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

149 points by fh973 2y ago

I chose Centos Stream 8 over Centos 8 because I figured that the stream version's rolling updates would result in a later EOL. When Red Hat announced the unexpectedly short EOL for 8 I was glad for my choice. That said, what has Red Hat said about an EOL for Stream, if any?

philipwhiuk 2y ago
Stream 8 is already EOL: https://blog.centos.org/2023/04/end-dates-are-coming-for-centos-stream-8-and-centos-linux-7/ https://blog.centos.org/2023/04/end-dates-are-coming-for-cen...
- TMWNN 2y ago
  D'oh! Thanks for the heads up.
  - rwmj 2y ago
    You can use LEAPP to move to CS9: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/leapp-explained-detail https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/leapp-explained-detail
    - justinclift 2y ago
      Heh Heh Heh "LEAPP" is an interesting name choice, in that one of SUSE's distro's is called "Leap". Wonder if there are trademark issues around that? LEAPP seems like it's been around for a few years now, so probably nothing serious.
dralley 2y ago
CentOS Stream has a 5-year lifecycle. Support ends when the full support (prior to maintenance support) period of the corresponding RHEL release ends.

authun 2y ago

There are so many alternatives to CentOS and RHEL that their absence is inconsequential.

major505 2y ago
Just curious. What are you guys using in place of centos? This days, ny servers are all debian or ubuntu server based.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  CentOS Stream
- RedShift1 2y ago
  AlmaLinux user here, happy with it, everything works.
  - dfedbeef 2y ago
    +1 Alma is great. I've interacted less with Rocky but both projects have great teams behind them, and both have a clear mission and promise to their users.
    - gepiti 2y ago
      +2 The transition was very smooth
- justinclift 2y ago
  Debian 12, after a period of using Ubuntu that ended when Canonical decided to put advertising in the friggin cli. Oh, and pushing snap, but the advertising is what really nailed it for me. ;)
  - Algent 2y ago
    I realy like debian but is there any equivalent to yum ? It did some really nice advanced stuff I don't think you can replicate with apt. The shell mode avoided me some really big trouble several times (erlang updates often made me uninstall anything using it on update). Current job doesn't give me many chances to use linux rn so I'm a bit out of touch. Recently took a look at rocky and it felt like a centos. also tried ubuntu but I recall I had to remove some ads package yeah.

justinclift 2y ago

Directly relevant: https://techstrongitsm.com/itsm-news/suse-offers-lifeline-to-stranded-centos-users-with-liberty-linux-lite/ https://techstrongitsm.com/itsm-news/suse-offers-lifeline-to... All they need to do, SUSE’s GM of the Business Critical Linux team, Rick Spencer, said, is simply change their CentOS 7 update repository to SUSE’s, avoiding any disruptive migrations or upgrades. HN article about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732016

BSDobelix 2y ago
Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Yeah. It's super ironic. ;)
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    It absolutely is, kind of unreal ;)
    - ghaff 2y ago
      It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.
      - justinclift 2y ago
        In hindsight I wish I'd told KB "No, don't do it" at the meeting prior to them joining. :/

otagekki 2y ago

Transitioning from CentOS 7 to RedHat 8 and 9 at my former company's private cloud has smooth for most teams, pareto-style, with 80% of migration-related incidents caused by the 20% of the teams that did some really weird changes to the VM's OS that was no longer allowed under RHEL 8 or 9. At first, I thought it was just to reduce the complexity of managing hardening rules for several OS and OS versions.

p_l 2y ago
It's a big issue for companies that have substantial deployment of CentOS7... and FedRAMP or similar clientele.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  It's a very big issue for scientific clusters which depend on CentOS, too. We'll find a way, though.
  - p_l 2y ago
    Scientific clusters have more options though, as Rocky/Alma and other alternatives to RHEL are available without dealing with "this distro does not ship FIPS-140-3 certified crypto" or similar.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Yes, that's true. However, tons of software was written solely for CentOS, so ironing out the small kinks will take some time. The problem is, scientific software can silently error out in many ways (like slightly lost accuracy), and detecting and fixing those will take some time. Considering some of these tools are developed over (almost two) decades, there's a lot of verification we have to go through.
      - p_l 2y ago
        Considering how many interesting issues that specific CentOS7-locked job had just with updating kernel to latest LTS (which required a lot of fun stuff as well, given that it didn't compile with included GCC)... ... I can imagine.

INTPenis 2y ago

Just a heads up, since I couldn't comment on the LWP article about this a few days ago. The leapp-upgrade program had a reproducible bug as late as last week where after every upgrade it inserted net.ifnames=0 into the kernel cmdline. So when the new RHEL 8 system booted up it was using the wrong interface names (eth). The fix was simply grubby --remove-args="net.ifnames=0" --update-kernel ALL but felt stupid since RH emphasize the interface name change and then they themselves sabotage it for us.

dncornholio 2y ago

This has been a huge shitshow for us. Migration has been such a pain for our VPS boxes, so that we just spooled up new instances on AlmaLinux and migrated data by hand. It was a long week.

quantumfissure 2y ago
Disaster for us too, not VPS but VMs on-prem.

nijave 2y ago

I used ELevate for a few VMs at home and it worked pretty well. I upgraded from Centos 7 to Alma 9 one release at a time https://almalinux.org/elevate/ https://almalinux.org/elevate/

cpach 2y ago
That looks very useful. Thank you for linking!

javier_e06 2y ago

We experienced a migration from CentOS7 to Rocky 8. Rocky 8 running on VirtulBox produces different results on some numerical tools compared with Docker container. CentOS 7 did not use to have that problem. Same program and floating point differences. Other than that Rocky 8 ran all right.

quantumfissure 2y ago

I'm always amazed and envious at how many successes people have had with the conversions. This has been a huge problem for me and I only have just about 75 boxes. Only about 15 or so have been converted successfully to RHEL 7.9 since March, none (successfully) to 8.x after that. 1. Convert2rhel has been a nightmare, only a few have worked properly the first time. I've had 8 tickets opened with Redhat. Once I get one working, the next one will fail with different problems. 2. LEAPP from 7.9 to 8.9 hasn't worked successfully yet. When it does it breaks absolutely everything from PHP to mail sending to databases. 3. I thought Alma might solve the problem, nope. Similar issues as point number 2. Or I get Python errors, or any variety of anything else. I'm not sure what our path is going to be (maybe Tuxcare or Suse or something), but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster. The anxiety is high.

BSDobelix 2y ago
>but I'm concerned about my job now since I was in charge of this and it's been a disaster. Your boss should understand this, if you are a medium sized company with highly configured boxes (pet style) and have to change major versions, crazy stuff always happens, I can tell you story's (especially firmware and blob related but also cronjobs, "optimized"-shell scripts, to really old php stuff and so on) about upgrades that will drive you to the church before you touch any "dnf upgrade", however that's why i tend for much shorter upgrade times (within 3-5 years). Customer had highly customized RHEL7 boxes, upgrade to 8 was "terror inducing", and went so far to rebuild nearly the whole infra (about 20 boxes but with really excellent documentation). You are not alone.
eraser215 2y ago
Is the problem ultimately to do with your configurations on your centos 7 boxes? Converting to rhel should be easy if you aren't doing anything that red hat wouldn't support in rhel.
- quantumfissure 2y ago
  Yeah, I thought so too (since they're only moving from COS signed to RH signed), but it's hard to describe. I've had everything from proxy issues; to python; to PHP-fpm breaking after the upgrade. It's just a constant flood of 1 step forward 3 back. Some from random gremlins. For example, last week I wanted to try a test conversion of a box to Alma linux and it worked fine, but broke PHP, so I had to revert the snapshot. This week, the analysis blows up completely, despite nothing changing on the box. And that's just dev systems, I have zero confidence to move any prod systems.

AHTERIX5000 2y ago

What a mess. Centos Stream 8 seemed to work at first but then after upgrade to 9 secure boot didn't work at all, I couldn't even boot the 9 install media.

candiddevmike 2y ago
Secure boot seems very problematic with stream 9. I was looking at their shim signing approval and it seemed like it wasn't there yet. IMO, Stream is just there for testing and no one cares if it works or not.

bluedino 2y ago

Companies like CIQ, OpenLogic, and TuxCare offer extended support for CentOS 7, and Red Hat offers services for RHEL7. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/10/2256230/red-hat-and-ciq-offer-extend-support-for-rhel-7-and-centos-7 https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/10/2256230/red-hat-an...

hypeatei 2y ago

Unrelated, but any major OS version change these days feels contrived and unnecessary. What is changing so drastically that we need a major version bump and hours of upgrading? IMO, the versioning should follow a pattern of 2024.01, 2025.03, etc.. and updates should be seamless.

dralley 2y ago
Enterprise linux distributions pin package versions through the entire "major" release. They get security backports and often feature backports (for the first few years) but nothing which would change an API or ABI - for 10+ years. As such, the answer to your question is "pretty much everything". Wildly different kernel, libraries, etc. In theory it would be nice to roll upgrades like you suggest, but there are huge swathes of industry for which it's not a practical solution.
- eraser215 2y ago
  ... And we all know that rolling upgrades frequently introduce breaking changes that don't make sense for enterprise environments. To your (great) point: Customers pay companies like red hat for software stability, both in how it works and how their software interfaces to it.

throwaway992673 2y ago

I stopped trusting CentOS dates and assumed CentOS 7 was EOL a long time ago because their yum repos were down, or they didn't provide certain updates anymore, or something. I noticed inconsistencies across machines I tried to update simultaneously, noticed there wasn't a common update point available (the machines were on slightly different versions to begin with), and decided it was junk and time to move on.

dralley 2y ago
You're sure that's not simply a matter of the client-side caching having expired on some machines (thus reaching out again for updates) vs. not having expired on other machines (thus not checking the repo a second time)? Alternatively maybe they were hitting different mirrors. But in either case, that's not an issue with the distribution.
- throwaway992673 2y ago
  Oh yes, I checked caching, checked that the URLs were official by comparing them to the URLs CentOS canonically suggested, checked that the URLs did include security update repos, definitely dove into commands for "force check updates" type commands and the kernel rpms just weren't there. Old ones, new ones, nothing. Now I could have made a mistake, and according to the article text CentOS 7 "isn't EOL yet" so if someone has a mirror that does work I'd be interested to see evidence that kernel updates are even available. I'm not checking myself though, I don't trust Oracle enough to risk spending time standing up a CentOS 7 machine.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]