Welcoming Intel to CentOS Stream

When we launched CentOS Stream in 2019, we wanted it to be a place where partners, customers, community members and individual developers could contribute to the future of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. In the four years since its introduction, Stream has become a powerful voice in shaping Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), providing a shortened feedback window to Red Hat Global Engineering and making it easier for contributors to directly impact capabilities and features of RHEL.

Today, we’re pleased to further strengthen our long collaboration with Intel by welcoming them to CentOS Stream, building on Intel’s established contributions to the Fedora Project. We look forward to Intel being a leading voice in many aspects of the project and are eager to see their contributions to a number of CentOS Stream Special Interest Groups (SIGs), including: 

• Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) SIG to help focus on newer ISA baselines and toolchain technologies in CentOS Stream, with the ultimate goal of performance improvements and carbon footprint reduction.
• Virtualization SIG to add end-to-end, out-of-the-box support for the latest virtualization security features, including confidential computing capabilities like Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX).
• Hyperscale SIG to enable, build and support the use cases of CentOS Stream deployments on large-scale infrastructures.

By contributing early and often to CentOS Stream, Red Hat and Intel can more effectively and efficiently support the latest hardware architecture advancements in RHEL, especially those that tackle emerging critical needs for our users. 

“We are truly excited to be participating in the CentOS Stream project as a path to our enterprise Linux innovation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Our goal is to leverage CentOS Stream and Fedora for all our upstream contributions for the Red Hat Ecosystem delivering greater Intel platform support.” stated Mark Skarpness, vice president and general manager, System Software Engineering, Intel Corporation.

Beyond contributing to CentOS Stream, our expanded collaboration with Intel encompasses a variety of areas, from 5G networks and edge computing to artificial intelligence (AI) and systems security. Together, we’re intending to make it easier to get the most out of Intel-based hardware across the hybrid cloud with Red Hat’s technologies.

This starts with enhancing performance for Red Hat’s portfolio running on Intel’s solutions. For example, we’ve enabled support for Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) within RHEL, which has shown to deliver a substantial performance gain for accelerating cryptographic and compression workloads. For organizations embracing the hybrid cloud, being able to quickly move encrypted data from on-premises to public clouds to the edge and everywhere in between is crucial, and this work is helping to further address this need.

Another area is AI, which requires substantial computing power to fully realize its next-generation benefits. Intel is a leader in accelerators that enable advanced AI applications and processes, and we’re pleased to now support Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series and Gaudi®2 AI accelerators in Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Additionally, our work with Intel on Intel TDX can help address trusted AI use cases for customers and partners alike, bringing additional layers of security to intelligent applications running on RHEL and Intel platforms.

From an edge perspective, we continue to push towards new use cases for edge computing across the hybrid cloud. You can read more about our work with Intel as we aim to bring IT and operational technology together on factory floors.

We welcome Intel’s participation in CentOS Stream and look forward to bringing even more architecture-driven innovation to our customers, especially as new requirements around AI/ML and edge computing come to light. If you want to see how collaboration happens in CentOS Stream, to contribute or to test the project yourself, all are welcome.