Circle Linux 8.4 Release Notes
2021-10-15 10:33:32
Welcome to the Circle Linux. We are excited to announce the general availability of the Circle Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures. This release is the culmination of months of hard work from every corner of the community.
The Circle Linux distribution is a dependable, smooth and safe platform building from the downstream of upstream vendor (acting as the previous CentOS role). Circle Linux conforms fully with redistribution policy and aims to have full functional compatibility with the upstream product.
Download
To download the release of Circle Linux, visit https://www.cclinux.org/download.
Major Changes
Security
IPsec VPN provided by Libreswan now supports TCP encapsulation and security labels for IKEv2.
The scap-security-guide packages have been rebased to version 0.1.54, and OpenSCAP has been rebased to version 1.3.4. These updates provide substantial improvements, including improved memory management.
The fapolicyd framework now provides integrity checking, and the RPM plugin now registers any system update that is handled by either the YUM package manager or the RPM Package Manager.
Networking
Nmstate is a host network API, which is fully supported in circle Linux 8.4. The nmstate package provides a library and nmstatectl command-line utility to declaratively manage host network settings.
The Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a kernel data forwarding mechanism for routing traffic through enterprise networks. For example, you can add tc filters to manage packets received from specific ports or carry specific types of traffic in a consistent manner.
The iproute2 utility introduces three new traffic control (tc) operations: mac_push, push_eth, and pop_eth, respectively, is used to add MPLS tags, build an Ethernet header at the beginning of packet and drop the outer Ethernet header.
Kernel
Proactive compaction starts memory compaction periodically before an allocation request is made. Therefore, the waiting time of specific memory allocation requests is reduced.
A new implementation of the slab memory controller for control group technology is now available in Circle Linux 8.4. The slab memory controller improves the utilization of slab and allows memory statistics to be transferred from page level to object level. As a result, you can see a significant decrease in total kernel memory usage and a positive impact on memory fragmentation.
The time namespace feature is provided in Circle Linux 8.4. This feature is useful for changing the date and time in the Linux container. Now you can also adjust the clock in the container after recovering from the checkpoint.
Circle Linux 8.4 supports the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) kernel modules set in 8th and 9th generation Intel Core Processors.
High Availability and Clusters
A persistent Pacemaker resource agent maintaining state data can detect faults asynchronously and inject faults into Pacemaker immediately without waiting for the next monitoring interval. A persistent resource agent can also speed up the cluster response time of services with high state overhead, because maintaining state data can reduce the state overhead of cluster operations (such as start, stop, and monitor) by not calling state separately for each operation.
Dynamic programming languages, web and database servers
Later versions of the following components are now available as new module streams:
- Python 3.9
- SWIG 4.0
- Subversion 1.14
- Redis 6
- PostgreSQL 13
- MariaDB 10.5
The following compilers and development tools have been updated:
- GCC Toolset 10
- LLVM Toolset 11.0.0
- Rust Toolset 1.49.0
- Go Toolset 1.15.7
Known Issues
Since Circle Linux is based on RHEL source code, the known issues in RHEL release notes are likely to appear in Circle Linux. We will be updating this section with new items or bugs as they are discovered.
Sources
All Circle Linux 8 sources are hosted at https://git.cclinux.org.
Getting Help
The Circle Linux is sustained by community driven help and guidance. If you are new to Circle Linux, the best place to start is at https://wiki.cclinux.org/en/home.
Thanks
We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product. Without them working lots and lots of hours in evenings, nights, weekends and holidays, we couldn’t have released this Release in the time we did, and we couldn’t witness the great changes in the community.
Copyright (C) 2021 The Circle Linux Project