title: "CentOS Connect 2025" title_lead: "January 30 – 31, 2025 • Brussels, Belgium" talks: - title: "CentOS Stream - a preview of RHEL, a solid base for CentOS SIGs" youtube: "1P7xYLt7rYk" speakers: - name: Troy Dawson desc: |
CentOS Stream is a Linux distribution built by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) engineers as part of RHEL development.
Innovation within the OS happens in Fedora. CentOS Stream provides a solid base for innovation on top of an OS. Many CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are building on and extending it in all sorts of interesting ways without needing to reinvent the wheel.
CentOS Stream also serves as a contribution path to RHEL itself. The source, the builds, the release, it all happens in the open.
Come and learn about what's new, what's coming, how to get involved both directly and through CentOS SIGs.
- title: "Leveraging the Kubernetes Enqueue Scheduling Plugin for Smarter Workload Placement" youtube: "vfuJsB8MCko" speakers: - name: Alessandro Di Stefano - name: Dennis Gilmore desc: |This session highlights the OKD community’s initiative to evolve Kubernetes scheduling into a dynamic, collaborative framework. Building on the experience gained from developing the Multiarch Tuning Operator for OpenShift, the initiative leverages Kubernetes' 2scheduling gates mechanism to go beyond multi-architecture-aware scheduling. It introduces a framework where multiple controllers can compete to inject augmented information into pod specifications, enabling smarter and more efficient pod placement across Kubernetes clusters.
Rooted in OKD, the upstream distribution of OpenShift, and running on CentOS Stream CoreOS, this effort showcases how the OKD community is driving innovation for scheduling in Kubernetes Clusters. The framework optimizes workload placement while coordinating with descheduling and autoscaling components.
This talk will explore how OKD’s community-driven approach connects observability platforms with Kubernetes’ scheduling ecosystem, closing the feedback loop for improved performance, SLA guarantees, cost savings, and energy efficiency. Attendees will also learn how this framework lays the foundation for a fully distributed, intelligent placement system for Kubernetes workloads.
Join us to discover how the OKD community is extending its vision through CentOS Stream CoreOS, fostering collaboration and innovation to advance Kubernetes scheduling.
- title: "Web revamp: We did it! (sort of...)" youtube: "e5POjZcmLXY" speakers: - name: Shaun McCance desc: |After a long time working on it, we finally launched the new website and docs site with the CentOS Stream 10 announcement. There was a lot of frantic scrambling among the Artwork, Infra, Docs, and Promo SIGs. There were snags. There were delays. But we finally got it out the door.
This talk will explore what we did. But more importantly, it will explore what we didn't do. We had to think hard about what work we could defer to meet deadlines. Learn how you can contribute tonight from the comfort of your hotel room.
- title: "OKD, kubernetes on CentOS Stream" youtube: "UDJzV5SJFRw" speakers: - name: Dennis Gilmore desc: | We are currently going through a big shift in OKD. We are working to have everything entirely built on CentOS stream. This talk will explain what we want OKD to look like and the steps we are taking to get there. - title: "From RPM to S2I of an OpenStack service in Konflux" youtube: "ouTzUKGldko" speakers: - name: Joel Capitao desc: |At RDO, we are experimenting building the OpenStack services from source instead of packaging them first with RPM. This initiative is conducted alongside the Konflux effort which is taking place within the Fedora community.
We'll present a PoC of an Openstack service built from source in the Cloud SiG Konflux tenant.
- title: "AlmaLinux: the special derivative" youtube: "r6CJwCvNsVw" speakers: - name: Andrew Lukoshko desc: |On the dates of CentOS Connect 2025, we get to celebrate exactly 4 years since the release of the very first beta version of AlmaLinux. While being RHEL (and later CentOS Stream) derivative AlmaLinux still does a lot of things differently both on the distribution and tooling sides. Our build system and mirror service are just the tip of the iceberg. In my talk I'd like to focus on more things we do differently, like:
... and many more.
This can be useful for users and developers to look at familiar features and processes from a new angle.
- title: "OpenScanHub and Packit: Fully automated static analysis of RPM-based distributions" youtube: "XYCh1hkCo-o" speakers: - name: František Lachman - name: Siteshwar Vashisht desc: |What if detecting bugs and vulnerabilities in RPM-based distributions could be seamless and fully automated?
OpenScanHub is a service for static and dynamic code analysis. It was internally used inside Red Hat to scan releases of RHEL for more than a decade and was open-sourced in 2023.
OpenScanHub can fully automatically scan RPMs and has the ability to do differential scans that helps in finding bugs that may be introduced on package updates and new distribution releases. By default, it supports static analyzers embedded in GCC, Cppcheck, ShellCheck, find-unicode-control, Clippy and is extensible to support other analyzers. It can collect reports from various analyzers at a single place to make it easy to analyze them.
OpenScanHub was recently integrated with Packit, a CI/CD solution for automating RPM package builds, tests, and distribution releases. This new integration performs differential scans on pull requests, so potential bugs may be found during the pull request review process and would not be introduced into the codebase.
In this talk, we will share ideas about how CentOS Stream and its derivatives may benefit from OpenScanHub.
- title: "CentOS Infra SIG review and updates" youtube: "jkc3jdxSZmA" speakers: - name: Fabian Arrotin desc: | The CentOS Infra Special Interest Group is there to serve the whole CentOS Ecosystem, especially the other SIGs. What has been achieved during the 2024 year ? What are some other goals for 2025 ? Let's present these though slides but also Q&A (hearing from SIGs themselves !) - title: "Hyperscale SIG update" youtube: "iXTIf4T1i_s" speakers: - name: Davide Cavalca - name: Neal Gompa desc: | 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. - title: "CentOS Alt Images - Lets Talk About It" youtube: "rXTK-CvB-OE" speakers: - name: Troy Dawson desc: | 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 some of his favorite images. - title: "Creating content collections for CentOS SIGs" youtube: "Hhy14OI9RTA" speakers: - name: Neal Gompa desc: |CentOS Hyperscale is constructed with the combination of CentOS Stream, Fedora EPEL, and our own produced packages. This gives us a broad content set, but since each of these are released with their own cadences, it becomes important to create discrete collections of this for various purposes (notably integration testing).
This talk will discuss the problem and share the solution created for the Hyperscale SIG, and show how other CentOS SIGs and communities can benefit from it.
- title: "OpenHPC - Running on Multiple Distributions" youtube: "bTvWE1ID0sw" speakers: - name: Adrian Reber desc: |OpenHPC is Linux Foundation project which tries to provide an easy starting point into High Performance Computing (HPC). Currently the OpenHPC projects supports Leap 15.5, openEuler 22.03 and different RHEL 9 clones (AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux). For those distributions OpenHPC provides RPMs and validated recipes which guide the user to a running HPC cluster.
In this session I want to give an introduction why OpenHPC exists and what special requirements HPC systems have, how OpenHPC builds its RPMs and how OpenHPC validates its released recipes with hundreds of tests for each release.
- title: "Something for SIGs: Story of Packit and CBS Koji" youtube: "RFxBy8SK_FE" speakers: - name: František Lachman desc: |For some time, Packit’s main target had been Fedora. But we have something for the CentOS Stream community as well. Specifically for CentOS SIGs this time.
Providing builds and CI for your SIG is not easy, and with Packit, we thought we could be of help. We were asked about this a long long time ago, but last year, Christian Glombek sent us the first contribution that kicked off the actual work and together with the Packit team, the work on automation for CBS Koji builds started for real. Just another Koji instance one would say. We’ve come a long way since then and learned our lesson. Come and see what it takes to automate RPM builds on CBS Koji in reality and how you can benefit from our work.
During the talk, we’ll show what we’ve managed to finish and what are our plans for the future.
- title: "The Road to EPEL 10" youtube: "3pbjS-tD4q8" speakers: - name: Carl George desc: |Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a yum repository of community maintained packages for use on CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For most of its history, each version of EPEL was made available after the corresponding major version of RHEL. This slowed down package availability, which then slowed down adoption of new RHEL major versions. In EPEL 9, package maintainers were able to build against CentOS Stream 9 early to have a large number of packages ready before the RHEL 9.0 launch.
For EPEL 10, the EPEL Steering Committee is expanding that strategy to all minor versions of RHEL 10. This will improve support for CentOS Stream and for specific minor versions of RHEL, resolving several key pain points of users and maintainers. Attend this talk to learn more about this bold initiative and the results achieved so far.
- title: "Automating CentOS Provisioning with Foreman" youtube: "psarnHrK89Y" speakers: - name: Nofar Alfassi desc: |Foreman is a robust, open-source solution for provisioning and managing CentOS systems at scale. This talk will highlight how Foreman simplifies the provisioning process for CentOS environments using PXE-based booting, image-based workflows, and integrations with hypervisors like Libvirt and VMware.
We’ll also explore recent advancements such as Secure Boot and IPv6 support, ensuring that Foreman remains compatible with modern CentOS infrastructure needs. A live demo will demonstrate how to efficiently provision CentOS systems, helping attendees streamline their workflows and manage environments with confidence.
Key Takeaways:
CentOS Connect is the contributor conference for CentOS, focusing on CentOS Stream, Special Interest Groups, and the entire Enterprise Linux ecosystem. CentOS Connect 2025 happens January 30 – 31, as part of the FOSDEM Fringe.
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