What is CERN CentOS 7 (CC7) ?

CC7 is due to be deprecated within the CERN environment on 30.06.2024, see OTG0145248

CERN Community ENTerprise Operating System 7 is the upstream CentOS 7, built to integrate into the CERN computing environment but it is not a site-specific product: all CERN site customizations are optional and can be deactivated for external users.

Documentation

• Documentation pages
• Installation instructions
• Example kickstart file

Release status

Linux Certification Committee Meeting on 14th of November 2014 decided to NOT perform formal certifications of future major linux versions at CERN, starting with CERN CentOS 7, instead "testing" and "production" releases will be provided: a "testing" release includes basic CERN environment integration setup only, a "production" one provides the same integration setup - tested and verified.

• end of support: 30.06.2024
• production release of CERN CentOS 7 is 7.8, available since April 2020. Previous production releases were: 7.7 (September 2019), 7.6 (December 2018), 7.5 (May 2018), 7.4 (September 2017), 7.3 (January 2017), 7.2 (January 2016), 7.1 (April 2015)
• testing release of CERN CentOS 7 was 7.0, first made available in August 2014.

Please note that production release may not include specific software and/or environment required for your daily work: please contact your Experiments / Groups computing environments responsibles for CERN CentOS 7 release status of particular software.

Differences between CentOS 7 and CERN CentOS 7

System updates

• CentOS 7 updates are released as these come from the build system. There is no QA / testing repository available.
• CERN CentOS 7 updates are staged (as on SLC5/6): all updates go first to testing repositories and are released to production once per week (except critical security vulnerability patches).
• CERN CentOS 7 includes the 'yum-autoupdate' system (same as on SLC5/6).

Note: CERN CentOS 7 packages (rpms) are the very same packages released by CentOS team.

Changed packages

• centos-release:
• Yum repositories files changed to use http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/cern/centos/7/
• Added CERN Linux Support RPM signing key.
• nss:
• Added CERN CA and GRID CA certificates as builtins.
• epel-release/centos-release-scl/centos-release-scl-rh:
• Yum repositories files changed to use http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/

---

What happened to Scientific Linux CERN (SLC) ?

As described at Next Linux version @ CERN the next major Linux release at CERN is based on CentOS Linux.

Scientific Linux CERN 6 and Scientific Linux CERN 5 will remain as current production releases.

---

CentOS 7 Alternative Architectures

We provide local mirror for CentOS AltArch, including aarch64 (ARM64).