CentOS 7 to be released shortly, project lead says

Summary: The "official" Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone CentOS is releasing its next major version today.
  

As expected, CentOS, the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, which now works hand-in-golve with Red Hat, will be releasing CentOS 7 on Monday — less than a month after RHEL 7 was released.
 
While the news hasn't been officially released yet, Karanbir Singh, the Project Lead for The CentOS Project, told me in an e-mail that: "This is the gold release, the content is signed, the ISOs will be on the mirrors."
 
News that the release candidate was on its way has been enough to overwhelm CentOS's servers. Singh explained that the CentOS server had been load-tested only against "about 10-thousand hits a minute and we've had about four times that."
 
Singh said that switching to a server that should be able to keep up with the load.
 
The release candidate itself was quietly released on July 4. Since, no major problems were found, CentOS's developers are going ahead with the final release today.
 
Like Red Hat's RHEL 7, the Linux 3.10 kernel-based CentOS 7 has the following new features:

• XFS is CentOS's new default file system: This enables you to scale file-systems up to 500 terabytes. You can, however, use Ext4 or other major Linux file systems if you prefer since XFS really only shows to advantage on 1 terabyte disks and larger with multiple processor cores.
• Microsoft Active Directory support: With this you'll be able to have cross-realm trust Windows, RHEL 7, and CentOS 7 domains. This is ideal if you have users working with heterogeneous operating system-based datacenters or server farms.
• The adoption of OpenLMI. This is a standard remote application programming interface (API). Red Hat has used this to provide unified management tools and a management framework to streamline administration and system configuration.
• Performance Co-Pilot is now included. This is a set of real-time frameworks and services for recording and monitoring system performance. This lets both system administrators and other sub-systems, such as systemd, keep a close eye on what's actually happening in a CentOS 7 server instance as it happens.
• The arrival of systemd: This is the replacement for init, the old Unix way of starting processes and services on a system and initializing resources. After years of debate, systemd has been adopted by Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. It's become the new default way to start Linux systems. It also incorporates performance profiles and tuning and instrumentation for optimized performance and easy scalability.

The CentOS 7 release, which remains free to all users, will be available on the CentOS site and its its mirrors within hours.
 
~ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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