The Photon OS team is pleased to announce the availability of the Beta Release of Photon OS 5.0. This release is available in pre-packaged binary formats, including bootable ISO, pre-installed OVA, Amazon AMI image, Google GCE image and Azure VHD. The Photon OS 5.0 Beta images can be downloaded from here https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Downloading-Photon-OS
Highlights of Photon OS 5.0
cgroupsv2 is enabled by default on Photon OS 5.0 Beta
Administrators can patch a running kernel without reboot with Kernel Live Patching
Improved security as containers can now be run as unprivileged users with containerd rootless support
pmd-nxtgen brings non-intrusive API-based configuration and monitoring of system services like systemd, networking, user management, package management etc.
network-config-manager consolidates and simplifies network configuration and administrative actions for the administrators.
Support for XFS and BTRFS filesystems
Photon OS 5.0 kernel enables support for Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs
Linux RT Kernel improves low-latency performance, stability enhancements and additional debugging capabilities.
Upgrade of the critical packages like linux, gcc (12.2), glibc(2.36), systemd (252.4), python(3.11.0) etc.
From January 2023, Photon OS 2.x will no longer offer security fixes, package upgrades, bug fixes or feature enhancements. Therefore, by extension, we will also not be publishing Photon 2.x base Container images to Docker Hub beyond this date. We strongly recommend that any users of Photon OS 2.x upgrade to the latest releases of Photon OS.
The Photon OS project team welcomes contributions from the community. Your comments, suggestions and bug reports would help us improve the future releases of Photon OS. You can find the resources in the following link to start contributing – https://github.com/vmware/photon#contributing
