Following the release of Photon OS 5.0 Beta earlier this year, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate 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. You can download the Photon OS 5.0 Beta images from here https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Downloading-Photon-OS.
What’s new in Photon OS 5.0
Photon OS 5.0 Beta introduced some exciting improvements over the 4.0, including support for cgroupsv2, Kernel Live Patching, rootless support for containerd, and enabled support for Intel Sapphire Rapids. pmd-nxtgen and network-config-manager provided excellent tools for administrators to configure, manage and perform administrative actions. You can read more about it here.
Highlights of Photon OS Release Candidate
RC uptakes Long-Term Support Kernel 6.1
Support for PostgreSQL 15 (drops support for PostgreSQL 12)
tdnf enhancements with more command line options and tools to manage tdnf configuration
Upgrades to core packages like systemd (253.0), cloud-init (23.1.1), openssl (3.0.8), etc.
Installer Changes
Now you can generate a custom initial ram disk, custom installer ISO & custom RPM-OSTree ISO through the command line.
A/B storage partition system allows seamless updates & rollback
Kickstart Network Configuration brings in improved flexibility for network configurations that allows multiple interfaces and facilitates better handling of the VLAN interfaces
Network Configuration Manager
Flexible and simplified network configuration using YAML files Netplan configuration syntax
The Photon OS project team welcomes contributions from the community. Your comments, suggestions, and bug reports would help us improve future Photon OS releases. You can find the resources in the following link to start contributing – https://github.com/vmware/photon#contributing
