CentOS Connect

Come talk to the members of the Automotive SIG and talk about ARM, SecureBoot, Image Mode, and other exciting topics of interest to the Automotive community. We'll be discussing our bootc strategy and dev cluster approach to build autosd for community partners!

This will be a combined meetup led by the Hyperscale and Alternative Images SIGs. This meetup will be an opportunity to sync up and collaborate on the next year of work within both SIGs.

Of particular focus will be expanding CentOS Stream 10 based deliverables (Hyperscale Spin, alternative desktop images, cloud and ARM disk images, etc.) and future efforts around growing the CentOS community.

OpenSSL upstream project gathers together maintainers of OpenSSL packages in various distributions. During OpenSSL Conference in Prague (October 2025) we have agreed to organize a next face to face meeting during FOSDEM'26 events.

Since Fedora Project, CentOS Stream, and RHEL package maintainers of OpenSSL and applications using OpenSSL are going to be present at FOSDEM, we want to extend this opportunity to other OpenSSL distribution maintainers to meet together and discuss packaging issues.

Join your fellow EPEL maintainers for this hackfest all about EPEL. Here are some of the topic areas we intend to explore.

• adding new packages to EPEL
• patching CVEs
• policy revisions
• mass branching improvements
• documentation

We'll also set aside a section of time for a general EPEL Q&A, geared specifically at helping Fedora contributors get onboarded to EPEL.

For a long time, there was a discussion to cooperate on Fedora Docs and CentOS docs – contentwise! In 2022, Ben Cotton and Shaun McCance jointly launched an initiative, which then struggled with resource problems.

Now, Fedora Council had approved a new Fedora Docs 2025 Community Initiative. It aims to use – and provide – special resources to put the long-standing ups and downs of Fedora documentation on a new, more sustainable footing.

We should investigate and test whether and how this can be linked to substantive cooperation between our neighborhood distributions, leading to mutual improvement of the respective documentation leading to better usability, especially for new users, and thus a win-win situation for all of us.

Possible topics:

• Documentation of application scenarios and tutorials for your own distribution, beyond the Red Hat/RHEL documentation.
• Specific documentation of server administration and server applications / use cases
• Requirements and documentation for the new Anaconda Web UI
• Sustainable dialogue on specific, cross-distribution technical issues, e.g., Grub, kernel, rescue environment

Contributions to further ideas are welcome.

In the first half, we should explore and discuss. In the second half, test 2-3 topics, maybe in subgroups.

The PTE (Packaging and Testing Experience) group maintains tools many CentOS contributors use: Packit, TestingFarm, tmt, Copr, and LogDetective.

We're open to discussing anything related to packaging and testing -- from shared checks and cross-distro collaboration to long-term plans and SIG-specific needs.

Bring your topics. This is not a presentation. We're here to listen.

Come if you:

• Use (or tried to use) any PTE tool
• Have feedback, complaints, or feature requests
• Want to influence what we build next
• Represent a SIG with specific testing needs
• Want to improve EPEL testing
• Work on shared checks, compose-level or cross-distro testing infrastructure

People working on related tools and services are welcome as well—we're always looking for collaboration opportunities and ways to improve integration across the ecosystem.

Bring your questions. Bring your frustrations. We'll bring answers.

Last year the CentOS Board created governance for a SIG Council to coordinate technical decisions within the Community and with related counterparts on teams within Red Hat. This session will briefly cover the creation of the governance and then introduce the members of the Council who are in attendance(or their seconds),

CentOS Alternative Images SIG has progressed alot in the past year. Troy will go over all the new Images we adding this past year and what we have planned next. He will also do a demo of some of his favorite images.

This presentation will provide an update on what the CentOS Hyperscale SIG has been working on, what work has been done by the Hyperscale SIG in CentOS Stream, what deliverables are available, how to use them, and what's coming up next.

This presentation will provide an update on what the CentOS Kmods SIG has been working on, what deliverables are available, how to use them, and what's coming up next.

What happened in 2025 in the CentOS infra ? What's next for 2026 ? Join us for a Infra SIG update and roadmap session and you'll find out !
In the Q&A section we'll also have possibility to discuss new feature requests you (SIGs) would like to see becoming available in the CentOS infrastructure

Join this panel discussion with members of the EPEL Steering Committee. After a brief round of introductions, the panel will discuss what is going on in EPEL and take questions from the audience.

leapp has long been a trusted and robust tool for in-place upgrades of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have recently expanded its functionality enabling in-place upgrades for CentOS Stream.

This presentation will cover:
- An introduction to leapp and the complex challenges of in-place upgrades that it addresses, demonstrating why you might prefer its automated, analytical approach over existing solutions.
- A detailed discussion on CentOS Stream upgrades, including a brief demonstration.
- A quick look at an exciting upcoming feature in the leapp project: the ability to perform upgrades and conversions between CentOS-like systems, such as CentOS Stream, RHEL, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux in one step.

Homelabs offer the freedom to deploy low-cost, sustainable infrastructure while retaining full control of the whole stack. In this presentation, we will show you that they can also be an incredible motivator for people to learn the intricacies of becoming a system and cloud architect.

​The transferable skills and fully open source platform provided by LXD are incredibly appealing. But will it CentOS? Mauro and Gregory will take you through their journey and share their findings. Towards the end of the presentation, they will test their luck with a live demo!

This session will go over the basics of community data analysis and how that applies to CentOS specifically. It will act as the start of a conversation that will continue in the lunch space about the analysis starting point for CentOS. The goal is to leave the day with 1 or 2 analysis questions the community will work on in 2026.

First off, what is the PTE group and why would it be important for CentOS? It stands for Packaging and Testing Experience group, bringing you tools and services like Copr (packaging), TestingFarm, tmt (testing), and Packit with LogDetective (experience) under one umbrella.

The traditional model fragments testing: upstream tests their code, distribution maintainers test packages, and users discover the gaps. PTE bridges this by creating a continuous testing pipeline where upstream changes are automatically built, tested in realistic distribution environments, and validated before integration.

Since CentOS Stream is one of the distributions we focus on, we want to present some of the planned changes in our projects that you might be subjected to encounter. Packit is taking over the Fedora/EPEL dist-git CI, Log Detective provides log analysis of fault builds on dist-git MRs, tmt team is working on a new way to define artifacts, Testing Farm newly supports image mode and Copr is using Pulp as it’s backend, and more.

If you find any of these tools anywhere on the spectrum of useful, misguided, promising, or frustrating, we’ll show you how you can help us move in a direction more suitable to you.

Maintaining CentOS deployments often relies on tools like bash scripts, Chef, Puppet, or similar solutions to reduce configuration drift across hosts. With bootc, a CNCF Sandbox project, and centos-bootc container images, you can significantly minimize that drift by making a single container image the source of truth for your systems, regardless of where they run.

This talk introduces centos-bootc bootable containers, which are OCI-compliant container images that include a kernel, bootloader, and initramfs. You will learn how to define operating system software and configuration using familiar tools such as DNF, but expressed in a Containerfile or Dockerfile.

The session covers how to use the centos-bootc base image, how to reuse existing tooling and infrastructure like GitOps pipelines to build and test images, and how to use the bootc CLI to install systems on physical machines or virtual machines. The bootc and centos-bootc projects integrate naturally with Kubernetes, VMs, bare-metal servers, and even developer workstations.

We propose a significant refactoring to the way the kernel is packaged. The goal is to address the current monolithic approach, which bundles tools and makes separate rebasing and iterative packaging improvements difficult. By "cutting the Gordian Knot," we aim to demonstrate a cleaner, more modular packaging structure that enhances maintainability, accelerates development cycles for bundled tools, and simplifies packaging evolution.

The talk will cover the problem space, the proposed solution architecture, the implementation process, and the expected benefits for the CentOS community and package maintainers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 11 is currently in its planning phase, and for the first time, we are pulling back the curtain to share our "60% plan" early in the cycle. This session explores a core architectural shift to the Constructible OS—a vision developed through deep, unprecedented collaboration between the RHEL 11 core team and the Fedora/CentOS communities.

As hardware landscapes fracture and specialized workloads like AI and Edge demand more flexibility—ranging from ARM v9 and RISC-V to advanced Intel ISA levels (x86-64-v3/v4)—RHEL is evolving from a static distribution into a dynamic, modular platform. We will discuss how the RHEL Business Unit (BU) is treating Fedora ELN and CentOS Stream as the primary, transparent engines for Major and Minor releases. Attendees will learn how the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Leaders (FRCL, pronounced freckle) initiative is bridging the gap between internal engineering requirements and public community trackers, allowing for a truly shared development lifecycle.

OKD has been on a journey of self discovery over the last year. We have been acting with courage to find the heart of who we want to be as a project. With CentOS as our brain, we have faced many challenges and overcome many obstacles as we have grown. This talk will explore the journey as we seek the wizard. We will have a brief look at how far we have come, outline where we want to take the project, and explore how OKD fits into the CentOS ecosystem.

During the past year, the CentOS Stream pipeline has undergone some changes. The CentOS Stream principle of everything being as open and transparent as possible is still the same. But we've looked at the CentOS Stream and RHEL pipelines and saw where things could be changed, hopefully for the better.

Come see what's the same, what's different, and how it might impact you.

We will talk about the Foreman project, its content management capabilities (Katello) and how it enables system administrators to manage the CentOS stream content. We will also dive into the possibilities for provisioning hosts based on the curated content.