Just four months after the release of first CentOS 8 series based on the Red Hed Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 source code, the second CentOS Linux 8 (1911) was released on Jan 15, 2020.
If you’re aware, CentOS is the “community version” of RHEL. The current release for CentOS 8, tagged as 1911, is derived from RHEL 8.1 source code, which is fully compatible with the upstream product.
The current release has come up with significant changes in infrastructure services, security, file system, storage, components for web and database servers, and Live patching for the kernel.
CentOS 8.1 includes a new routing protocol stack, FRR replacing the previous Quagga. FRR provides support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols.
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Some components are now available as new module streams such as PHP 7.3, Ruby 2.6, Node.js 12, and Nginx 1.16.
The new tools are also available that bring better security policies to harden the container deployment for better control and access to host system resources, such as storage, devices, and network.
For Linux hard disk encryption, the LUKS standard has been upgraded to the LUKS version 2 (LUKS2) format, which now supports re-encrypting block devices while the devices are in use.
Pre-installed packages are also updated in CentOS Linux 8 (1911) such as yum, thunderbird, grub2, dhcp, cockpit, firefox, httpd, etc.
The current users of CentOS can apply all updates on existing CentOS Linux 8 by just running ‘dnf update.’ And if you are new, CentOS Linux 8.1 (1911) installation images are available to download from here, which requires at least 2GB RAM, although 4GB RAM is recommended.
