14 DAY TRIAL // CentOS developers Karanbir Singh and Jim Perrin announced the release of the CentOS 7.4 operating system for supported architectures, a release that brings all the latest updates and security patches.
Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 operating system, the CentOS 7.4 (1708) release is available for 64-bit x86 compatible machines, as well as ARM64 (AArch64), ARMhfp, PPC64 (PowerPC 64-bit), and PPC64le (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian) hardware architectures.
CentOS 7.4 comes with new packages, among which we can mention Qt5, Pidgin, python-netifaces, python-gssapi, and mod_auth_openidc, ALPN and DTLS (TLS via UDP) support for OpenSSL, as well as NVMe Over Fabric support in the NVM-Express kernel driver.
The release also deprecates the use of the SSH1 cryptographic protocol from the OpenSSH server. "There have been various changes/enhancements to cryptographic abilities of various packages. i.e. sendmail now supports ECDHE, OpenSSH now using SHA2 for public key signatures," reads the release notes.
Several packages were rebased, Amazon ENA drivers added to kernel
Among other changes incorporated in the CentOS 7.4 (1708) release, we can mention that a bunch of packages were rebased, Amazon ENA drivers have been added to the kernel, which was also rebased to Linux 4.11, the NSS and ca-certificates packages now meet the recommendations of the latest Mozilla Firefox ESR browser.
A few experimental features are available as well in CentOS 7.4, such as nested virtualization with KVM, Cisco VIC and usNIC kernel drivers, Ansible support, multi-threaded XZ compression with rpm-builds, support for System Roles, a CephFS kernel client, as well as Btrfs and OverlayFS support.
Installation images of CentOS 7.4 (1708) are now available to download for supported architectures from the official website, but existing users need only to apply all the updates that are present in the operating system's repositories by running "sudo yum update" command in a terminal emulator.