After 8 months of the last version released the release of the new update version of the distribution CentOS 8.4 (2105) in which changes have been made from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. This branch of CentOS Linux 8 will continue to receive new updates until the end of the year, with which later it will be discontinued in favor of Red Hat concentrating those resources in CentOS Stream.
And it is that as we already mentioned here on the blog in various articles, CentOS Stream will replace the classic CentOS 8 at the end of the year, it is possible to roll back to the previous versions of the package using the command "dnf downgrade", if there are several versions of the same application in the repository.
Work has been done to unify the names of the repositories (repositories), which are reduced to lowercase (for example, the name "AppStream" is replaced by "appstream"). To switch to CentOS Stream, simply change the names of some files in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory, update the repoid, and correct the use of the "–enablerepo" and "–disablerepo" flags in your scripts.
CentOS Linux 8.4 Key New Features
In addition to the new features introduced in RHEL 8.4, the content of 34 packages has changed in CentOS 8.4 (2105), including anaconda, dhcp, firefox, grub2, httpd, kernel, PackageKit, and yum. Changes to packages are generally limited to rebranding and artwork replacement, plus RHEL-specific packages such as redhat- *, insights-client, and subscription-manager-migration * were removed.
As in RHEL 8.4 for CentOS 8.4, additional AppStream modules are formed with new versions Python 3.9, SWIG 4.0, Subversion 1.14, Redis 6, PostgreSQL 13, MariaDB 10.5, LLVM Toolset 11.0.0, Rust Toolset 1.49.0 and Go Toolset 1.15 .7.
The boot iso solves an issue where the user was forced to manually enter the mirror URL to download packages. In the new version, the installer now chooses the mirror closest to the user as the developers mention that there is much less traffic towards the CentOS source RPM compared to
binary RPMs, so they consider it inappropriate to put this content on the primary mirror.
If users want to mirror this content, they can do so using the reposync command available in the yum / dnf-utils package. The source RPMs are signed with the same key that is used to sign their binary.
Updates released since the initial release are released in all architectures. We highly recommend all users to apply all updates,
Regarding known issues It is mentioned that when installing this new update version In VirtualBox, you must select the "Server with GUI" mode and use VirtualBox not older than 6.1, 6.0.14 or 5.2.34, since otherwise there will be problems.
In addition, RHEL 8 discontinued support for some hardware devices that may still be relevant. The solution may be to use the centosplus kernel and the iso images prepared by the ELRepo project with additional drivers.
The automatic procedure to add AppStream-Repo does not work when using boot.iso and installed over NFS and PackageKit cannot define local DNF / YUM variables.
Finally if you want to know more about it About this new version, you can check the details in the following link
Download CentOS 8.4
Finally for all those who are interested in being able to install this new version of the system should go to their official website and in your download section you can get the image of the system, the link is this. This picture is available for you to implement on any physical machine, as well as in any other application that allows the creation of virtual machines, such as VirtualBox or Gnome Boxes.
The distribution is fully binary compatible with RHEL 8.4 so CentOS 2105 and its prepared builds are ready for download either the 8 GB DVD image or 605 MB netboot for x86_64, Aarch64 (ARM64) and ppc64le architectures.
The SRPMS packages on which the binaries and debugging information are based are available through the following link