I know that Centos 8 has end of life on December 2021.
Everyone is talking about RockyLinux and how cool it is. But nobody mentioned what is EOL of it?
Will it be longer than Centos one?
Is there any information on the website? Any official announcement?
At the moment I cannot see such information.
My guess would be the same date as Red Hat 8
(just my guess)
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Correct, Rocky 8 will have an EOL later than CentOS. CentOS EOLs December 2021. Rocky 8 will be supported until May 2029 (and extended through 3rd party support providers).
@hbjy @ressonix thoughts on placing EOL information more prominently on the website?
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I’ve mentioned the need of publishing the EOL information on the website in the Mattermost general channel about a month ago. We need this posted to aid in adoption IMHO. There was even a recent Reddit post inquiring for this information.
I think it was pretty much obvious anyway that the projects that spawned because of what RH did with CentOS, that they would be tracking the RHEL EOL like what CentOS used to do. Therefore the 10 year release cycle.
What annoyed the community was not just what RH did by changing CentOS to CentOS Stream, but also by shortening the EOL of CentOS 8 in an attempt to force everyone over to CentOS Stream. They left CentOS 7 with a 10 year EOL as they didn’t shorten this, and a lot of people had already migrated to CentOS 8 only to find that they now have a shortened EOL and have to now repeat the migration process. Therefore I think everyone that followed this would know that the EOL is tracking RHEL and not CentOS Stream EOL.
But doesn’t hurt to publish it, for example like Ubuntu does against the download links. I don’t think it could be more prominent than this. When you go to download you can immediately see how long it would then be supported for.
thanks for the awesome information.
Do you have an official page to clarify the EOL of RL8.4?
To recommend RL8.4 to someone those who wanted to find a replacement of current CentOS8,
without an evidence(official info) of EOL is not ideal.
If you already have it, please let us know.
Thank you in advance.
The way I treat Rocky8 (and CentOS before this) is that the point releases aren’t supported, as such; I just treat them as a point-in-time release of the major version.
Thus I expect “8.4” to be out of support when “8.5” is released. Simply because if you properly patch your 8.4 system then you’ll have an 8.5.
Instead I track the major release; Rocky 8 is supported until 2029.
Thank you @sweh for the clarification!
I should have asked EOL of RL8.
Do you have any source of info about “Rocky 8 is supported until 2029”??
Thank you again for your help.
As @sweh pointed out, the point release versions are just a point of time. The moment 8.5 drops, 8.4 is no longer supported and a dnf update will bring you to the latest. We only support what is latest and current as released by upstream and us.
RHEL has generally had a 10 year lifecycle on a release where the first 5 years is fully supported (which is generally two point releases a year) and then goes to maintenance mode for the last 5 years where X.9 is the final (RHEL 5 and 6 are notable exceptions to this, 5 ended with 5.11, 6 ended with 6.10).
Myself and other leads have talked about putting a clarifying page on how the EOL generally works. The red hat policy page actually goes over how they do it and we generally follow the same idea (sans EUS and supporting point releases older than what’s current).
Below is sort of an example. This isn’t perfect and is more of a projection based on how releases have historically happened. For the sake of the example, I threw in when expected future EL drop times, which historically is around the .6 of the current production release. (EL9 and EL10 are just examples and are likely not accurate, but the EL8 should be pretty close to accurate). This tries to follow the “every 3 years” plan that Red Hat has said they would be doing going forward.
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Thank you for your detailed answer!
It helps a lot.
Hi @nazunalika,
would it be possible to post the release and end of life schedules on the website?
Regards
Matthias
In terms of the language used, it might be best to refer people to the RH schedules, as opposed to stating specific dates, because things can change (as we’ve seen with CentOS).
+1 on getting the EoL schedule on the website.
We’re tracking these on https://endoflife.date, and having a primary source (instead of a forum post) to refer to would be so much better.
PR here: Add Rocky Linux by istiak101 · Pull Request #487 · endoflife-date/endoflife.date · GitHub
thanks my issue has been fixed.