Software Update: CentOS 7 (1708)

CentOS is an open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 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 within the top ten. A new version of CentOS appears every two years, which is then provided with updates for seven years. Version 7 (1708) of CentOS is now released and the full release notes are here to find. In short, these are the main changes:

Major Changes

• Since release 1503 (abrt>= 2.1.11-19.el7.centos.0.1) CentOS-7 can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org. You can find information about that feature at this page.
• Various new packages include among others: python-gssapi, python-netifaces, mod_auth_openidc, pidgin and Qt5.
• SSH1-support has been removed from the SSH server. Along with this move, all cryptographic protocols and algorithms which are considered insecure have been deprecated. More on this can be found here and here.
• OpenSSL now supports DTLS (TLS over UDP) and ALPN.
• NVMe Over Fabric is now supported in the NVM-Express kernel driver.
• There have been various changes/enhancements to cryptographic abilities of various packages. Ie sendmail now supports ECDHE, OpenSSH now using SHA2 for public key signatures, … among others. All changes are too numerous to mention here, so please take a look at the upstream release notes.
• Various packages have been rebased. Some of those are openLDAP, samba, clufter, ipmitool, tcpdump, shim, GNOME, NetworkManager, Kernel-GRE module, openssh, openSSL, libreswan, chrony, rsyslog, sudo and libvirt. Users of openldap should see the note in the known issues section below.
  Because of these rebases some 3rd party repositories (Like EPEL, nux!, etc.) may not have all their packages rebuilt to use the newer packages in this release. This may cause the inability to update to the new release until those repositories fix their dependencies. You should contact the 3rd party repository owner to get problems fixed, or remove problem packages from 3rd party repositories to complete the update to this release. This is also true for Special Interest Groups like virt (xen/ovirt), storage (ceph/glusterfs), pas (openshift-origin), and cloud (RDO). You may need to wait to upgrade until the SIGs can build new packages against the 7 (1708) release.
• ca-certificates and nss now meet the recommendations as published with the latest Mozilla Firefox ESR.
• Amazon ENA drivers have been added to the kernel. For more information about ENA go to this page.
• Lots of updated storage, network and graphics drivers.
• Technology Preview: Among others support of ansible and System Roles, OverlayFS, Btrfs, CephFS kernel client, the Cisco VIC and usNIC kernel driver, nested virtualization with KVM and multi-threaded xz compression with rpm-builds.
  More information can be found here.
• If you plan to use Security Profiles in Anaconda, please see this link.