Overview

With support for the CentOS Distribution being discontinued, StarlingX will move to the Debian OS Distribution. Debian is a well-established Linux Distribution supported by a large and mature open-source community and used by hundreds of commercial organizations, including Google. When fully transitioned to Debian, StarlingX will have full functional equivalence to the current CentOS-based versions of StarlingX.

The planned rollout for the transition to Debian is as follows:

StarlingX release 6.0 (RELEASED)

  • General Availability (GA) Release of CentOS7 StarlingX (for production deployments)

  • Moved to 5.10 kernel, which will be used by the upcoming Debian-based release.

StarlingX release 7.0

StarlingX release 7.0 is a general Availability (GA) Release of CentOS7 StarlingX for production deployments. It will be the last release of a CentOS7 –based StarlingX.

StarlingX release 7.0 inherits the 5.10 version of the Linux kernel introduced in StarlingX release 6.0.

StarlingX release 7.0 is also a technology Preview Release of Debian StarlingX for evaluation purposes.

StarlingX release 7.0 release runs Debian Bullseye (11.3). It is limited in scope to the AIO-SX configuration. Duplex, and standard configurations are not available.

See Technology Preview Reduced Scope for details.

Debian StarlingX General Availability

An upcoming release will make Debian StarlingX generally available for production deployments.

This upcoming release will run Debian Bullseye 11.3 or later with full functional equivalence to the CentOS-based StarlingX.

Planned in-service upgrade paths for StarlingX

  • StarlingX release 6.0 running CentOS ==> StarlingX release 7.0 running CentOS ==> StarlingX Debian general availability release

or

  • StarlingX release 6.0 running CentOS ==> StarlingX Debian general availability release

Note

There will be no upgrade paths related to the StarlingX release 7.0 Debian Technology Preview release.

The StarlingX release 7.0 Debian Technology Preview allows you to evaluate and prepare for the upcoming Debian-based General Availability release while continuing to run your production deployment on CentOS-based StarlingX. It is strongly recommended that you perform a complete assessment of StarlingX and your application running on StarlingX in a lab setting to fully understand and plan for any changes that may be required to your application when you migrate to Debian-based StarlingX the StarlingX Debian General Availability release in a production environment.