Download CentOS 8.4 (2105)

CentOS is an open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux that is designed for use in enterprise environments. The name is an abbreviation of Community ENTerprise Operating System. Unlike RHEL, CentOS is free to use. When looking at popularity, CentOS falls just outside the top twenty. Version 8.4 (2105) of CentOS has now been released and the full release notes are here to find. The most important changes in this release are listed below:

Upstream changes

see the Overview section of the upstream RHEL 8.4 release notes. Of particular note, this release adds the following new versions of software in optional module streams.

• Python 3.9
• SWIG 4.0
• Subversion 1.14
• Redis 6
• PostgreSQL 13
• MariaDB 10.5

Several rolling AppStream have been rebased to newer versions.

• LLVM Toolset 11.0.0
• Rust Toolset 1.49.0
• Go Toolset 1.15.7

Fully Functional Boot ISO

Since the initial release of CentOS Linux 8, our boot ISO has suffered from a number of issues that resulted in users needing to enter a mirror URL manually. We recently resolved that issue in CentOS Stream 8, and have brought the same fixes to CentOS Linux 8 (2105). With this release the boot ISO will now default to using the closest mirror and no longer require entering a mirror URL manually.

Downgradeable Packages

We recently enabled downgradeable packages in CentOS Stream 8, and have brought that same change to CentOS Linux 8 (2105). Going forward users will be able to downgrade dnf packages if multiple packages are available.

Yum repo file and repoid changes

Recently we’ve done work so that CentOS Stream operates as a distribution independently of CentOS Linux. Continuing this work, we made some changes in CentOS Linux 8.3.2011 that make the process of migrating from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream easier. This meant that we needed to change the name of some files in /etc/yum.repos.d and update repoids to match.

As a good practice with any update, if you have made any local customizations to files in /etc (including the .repo files), you will want to compare with any .rpmnew files that are created for you. You may also want to update any scripts that you have that specify repoids using the –enablerepo or –disablerepo flags