CentOS SIG Council - Intro and Introductions

Amy Marrich

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 Alt Images - Lets Talk About It

Troy Dawson

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.

Hyperscale SIG update

Neal Gompa • Davide Cavalca

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.

CentOS Kmods SIG - Review and Update

Peter Georg

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.

Infra SIG update and roadmap

Fabian Arrotin

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.

EPEL Steering Committee Q&A

Neal Gompa • Carl George • Troy Dawson • Davide Cavalca

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.

In-place upgrades of Centos Stream with leapp

Slides

Matej Matuska • Michal Bocek

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.

Amazing homelabs with CentOS Stream and LXD

Mauro Gaspari • Grégory Schiano

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!

CentOS Community Data Analysis Kick Off

Cali Dolfi

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.

PTE: What’s coming up in Copr, TestingFarm, tmt, Packit and LogDetective

František Lachman • Cristian Le

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.

bootc: Managing Your CentOS Deployments Like You Manage Your CentOS Container Applications

Joseph Marrero Corchado

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.

Cutting the Gordian Knot of Kernel Packaging: A Refactoring Proposal

Neal Gompa • Michel Lind

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.

Inside the RHEL 11 Planning Room: How Fedora and Stream Shape the Next Enterprise OS

Scott McCarty

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, CentOS Stream, and the Yellow Brick Road

Dinnis Gilmore

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.

CentOS Stream changes: ROG, Konflux and more

Troy Dawson

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.

Managing CentOS content and provisioning hosts using Foreman

Shimon Shtein

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.