About Stream
CentOS Stream is a Linux distribution built by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) engineers as part of RHEL development. It serves as a preview of the next minor RHEL version, as well as a contribution path to RHEL itself, and a solid base for CentOS SIGs.
A new major version releases roughly every three years, and stays around for about five years.
Relation to Fedora¶
CentOS Stream (CS) is based on Fedora.
Fedora Project maintains a preview of the next major version of CentOS Stream, called Fedora ELN, which itself is based on Rawhide (a development branch of Fedora Linux).
While ELN follows Rawhide continuously, CentOS Stream is created roughly once every three years, and then follows its own update cycle.
When a new version of CentOS Stream is being created (bootstrapped), that happens in three phases:
- Bootstrap - for a brief period of time, ELN and CentOS Stream sources are being synced and builds are being performed automatically. During this time, the CentOS Stream buildroot is created and the distribution gets ready to exist on its own.
- Pre-release - at this phase, CentOS Stream is fully independent. It's being stabilised and prepared for a proper release. ELN starts tracking the next major version.
- Release - from this moment, CentOS Stream is fully available.
Updates and API/ABI stability¶
Because CentOS Stream shares its sources with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it needs to follow the same promises Red Hat makes in terms of API/ABI stability etc.
Please see the following resources for more information: