CentOS-7 (1503) Release Notes
Last updated: October 11, 2015
Contents
1. Translations
Translations of these release notes are available for the following languages:
2. Introduction
Hello and welcome to the second CentOS-7 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)1.
CentOS conforms fully with Red Hat's redistribution policy and aims to have full functional compatibility with the upstream product. CentOS mainly changes packages to remove Red Hat's branding and artwork.
We have decided not to follow Red Hat's usage of Installation Roles. In CentOS Linux all content from every distribution 'channel' is made available to the user at time of installation.
There is a documented and recommended upgrade path from CentOS-6 to CentOS-7. This path is only supported from the latest version of CentOS-6 (being 6.6 at the time of writing) to the latest version of CentOS-7. For more information on the upgrade procedure please take a look at upstream documentation. The tools needed for this functionality are still being tested and will be released at a later time. If you can help with the testing, please see this CentOS-Devel mailing list thread and this wiki entry.
Please read through the other sections before trying an install or reporting an issue.
3. Install Media
Various installation images are available for installing CentOS. Which image you need to download depends on your installation environment. All of these images can either be burned on a DVD or dd’ed to an USB memory stick.
If you are unsure which image to use, pick the DVD image. It allows selecting which components you want to install.
Live media images are also available, both for Gnome and KDE desktop environments. These allow you to test out CentOS by booting from the DVD or USB stick. The third livecd image uses Gnome, and as the livecd name implies, it is small enough to fit on a CD. This image does not contain libreoffice. You can also install CentOS to your hard disk from the live media images, but please note that what gets installed on your hard disk is exactly the same as you see when using the live media. For more flexibility in selecting which packages you want to have installed, please use the DVD image.
The netinstall image can be used for doing installs over network. After booting the computer with the netinstall image, the installer will ask from where it should fetch the packages to be installed.
The everything image contains all the packages that are available for CentOS-7, including those that are not directly installable from the installer. If you want to install those other packages, you must mount the install media on your installed system after the installation, and copy or install the packages from there. For most users installing from the DVD image and then installing the other packages with ”yum install <packagename>” instead is probably easier.
Attention |
Attention |
4. Verifying Downloaded Installation Images
Before copying the image to your preferred installation media you should check the sha256sum of the downloaded installation images.
sha256sum x86_64: 85bcf62462fb678adc0cec159bf8b39ab5515404bc3828c432f743a1b0b30157 CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1503-01.iso 8c3f66efb4f9a42456893c658676dc78fe12b3a7eabca4f187de4855d4305cc7 CentOS-7-x86_64-Everything-1503-01.iso 96ee805573d0617ee11704e7973b55387adef13c6efdc82d50d287dba00dfaf1 CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveCD-1503.iso 2cfc9fab2edb0be51b75ee63528b61cad79489129d2aad1713eeed1b4117ab47 CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveGNOME-1503.iso 6b2cd1c30092e9a141a458d40d0fcba74207b6c80e4f68dc7f800fbe1d7bae1b CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveKDE-1503.iso 7cf1ac8da13f54d6be41e3ccf228dc5bb35792f515642755ff4780d5714d4278 CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1503-01.iso 498bb78789ddc7973fe14358822eb1b48521bbaca91c17bd132c7f8c903d79b3 CentOS-7-x86_64-NetInstall-1503.iso
5. Major Changes
As of March 2015 ABRT (>= 2.1.11-19.el7.centos.0.1) can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org. You can find information about that feature at this page
- Support for new processors (Intel Broadwell) and graphics (AMD Hawaii)
- Full support for LVM cache
- Ability to mount ceph block devices
- Updated Hyper-V network drivers
- New libguestfs features
- Full support for OpenJDK-1.8.0
- Improved clock stability (for PTP and NTP)
- Updated Networkmanager packages to version 1.0
- Updated docker to 1.4.1
- Updated OpenSSH to 6.6.1
- New package: Mozilla Thunderbird
- Update to numerous storage, network and graphics drivers
- Technology Preview: Support of the Btrfs file system, OverlayFS and the Cisco VIC kernel driver
More information can be found here.
6. Deprecated Features
- i686-versions of the following packages: krb5-server and krb5-server-ldap
- further deprecated packages: libvirt-daemon-driver-lxc, libvirt-daemon-lxc and libvirt-login-shell
7. Known Issues
A list of known upstream issues can be found here. Given that we build from the same sources, many if not all of those issues will likely also apply to CentOS Linux.
- You can only do a Minimal install from the Minimal image, even though the installer may present you other package options as well. Additional components can be installed after installation, or you can use the other installation images to install the options you want.
If you are using Dell OpenManage 7.4.1 or 8.1.0, omreport storage vdisk and some other subcommands may not show the requested information. This appears to be a problem with RHEL 7.1 as well. OMSA 8.1.0 with a slightly modified libstorelib file seems to work. Please run systemctl restart dataeng.service after modifying the file as instructed. The required release_date driver attribute was reintroduced in kernel 3.10.0-229.7.2, making patching OMSA files unnecessary.
The updated libreoffice calc packages introduce a bug which affects sorting in spreadsheets. See this and this bug report.
- The newer version of openssh in this release does not exit on the first match in the .ssh/config file as the older version did. This means if you have multiple host sections that match in your config for a given host, ALL will be applied. As an example, if you have a "host1.example.com" entry and a "*.example.com" entry, it will apply BOTH sets of instructions to "host1.example.com" but only the "*.example.com" section for "host2.example.com".
Many people have complained that Ethernet interfaces are not started with the new default NetworkManager tool/have to be explicitly enabled during installation. See CentOS-7 FAQ#2.
- The installer needs at least 406MB of memory to work. On systems with less memory then 406MB the installation will terminate with a fatal error. 512MB is the minimum memory requirement for CentOS-7.
Installing CentOS-7 to a VirtualBox virtual machine in UEFI mode on an encrypted file system does not work properly. The installed system will not show the prompt for the volume passphrase, unless the kernel command line is modified. See the bug report for more details.
- If your screen resolution is 800x600 or lower, parts of the images shown at the bottom during install are clipped.
VMware Workstation/VMware ESXi allow to install two different virtual SCSI adapters: BusLogic and LsiLogic. However the default kernel from CentOS-7 does not include the corresponding driver for any of them thus resulting in an unbootable system if you install on a SCSI disk using the defaults for CentOS Linux. If you select 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux' as OS, the paravirtualized SCSI adapter is used, which works.
Commonly used utilities such as ifconfig/netstat have been marked as deprecated for some considerable time and the 'net-tools' package is no longer part of the @core group so will not be installed by default. Use nmcli c up ifname <interfacename> to get your network up and running and use yum to install the package if you really need it. Kickstart users can pull in the net-tools package as part of the install.
The AlpsPS/2 'ALPS DualPoint TouchPad' edge scrolling does not work by default on CentOS-7. See bug 7403 for the command to make this feature work.
In VirtualBox up to version 4.3.12 the building of the vBox additions fails. This is solved starting with version 4.3.14. On Windows hosts there still seem to be some issues with versions up to 4.3.16. After installing vBox additions logging in to GNOME Desktop results in a black screen or a terminating VM.
8. Fixed Issues
For all the fixed issues it is best to look at the errata release page here and look for fixes dated after March 2nd 2015.
9. Packages and Applications
9.1. Packages modified by CentOS
- abrt
- anaconda
- apache-commons-net
- basesystem
- chrony
- compat-glibc
- dhcp
- firefox
- grub2
- httpd
- initial-setup
- ipa
- kabi-yum-plugins
- kernel
- libreport
- ntp
- openssl098e
PackageKit
- perl-Module-Load-Conditional
- plymouth
- redhat-lsb
- redhat-rpm-config
- shim-signed
- sos
- subscription-manager
- system-config-date
- system-config-kdump
- thunderbird
- xulrunner
- yum
9.2. Packages removed from CentOS that are included upstream
- Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-Release_Notes-7-*
- redhat-access-gui
- redhat-bookmarks
- redhat-indexhtml
- redhat-logos
- redhat-release-*
- subscription-manager-firstboot
- subscription-manager-migration
- subscription-manager-migration-data
9.3. Packages added by CentOS that are not included upstream
- centos-bookmarks
- centos-indexhtml
- centos-logos
- centos-release
9.4. Packages released as 7.1406 updates with older packages on the 7.1503 install media
- firefox
- subversion
- xulrunner
10. Sources
All CentOS-7 sources are hosted at git.centos.org. All code released into the distribution originated from git.centos.org.
Source RPMs will also be published once the release is done, in the usual location at http://vault.centos.org/centos/7/
From a CentOS machine you can easily retrieve sources using the yumdownloader --source <packagename> command.
11. How to help and get help
As a CentOS user there are various ways you can help out with the CentOS community. Take a look at our Contribute page for further information on how to get involved.
11.1. Special Interest Groups
CentOS consists of different Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that bring together people with similar interests. The following SIGs already exist (among others):
Artwork - create and improve artwork for CentOS releases and promotion
Promotion - help promoting CentOS online or at events
Virtualization - unite people around virtualization in CentOS
And we encourage people to join any of these SIGs or start up a new SIG, e.g.
- ARM, PPC and i386 port - help with porting CentOS to other architectures
- Hardware compatibility - provide feedback about specific hardware
- RPM Packaging - contribute new useful RPM packages
- Translation - help translating the documentation, website and Wiki content
11.2. Mailing Lists and Fora
Another way you can help others in the community is by actively helping and resolving problems that users come up against in the mailing lists and the fora.
11.3. Wiki and Website
Even as an inexperienced CentOS user we can use your help. Because we like to know what problems you encountered, if you had problems finding specific information, how you would improve documentation so it becomes more accessible. This kind of feedback is as valuable to others as it would have been to you so your involvement is required to make CentOS better.
So if you want to help out and improve our documentation and Wiki, register on the Wiki or subscribe to the centos-docs mailing list.
12. Further Reading
The following websites contain large amounts of information to help people with their CentOS systems:
Upstream release notes and documentation : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/
13. Thanks
We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product and would like to specifically acknowledge the extra effort made by the QA Team. Without them working lots and lots of hours in evenings, nights, weekends and holidays, we couldn't have released this Release as fast as we did. A special thanks also goes to the CentOS-community. A more complete list of the contributors to this release can be found at /usr/share/doc/centos-release/Contributors of your new CentOS-7 installation.
Copyright (C) 2015 The CentOS Project
Visit http://www.redhat.com/rhel/ (1)