Today, December 14, 2016, CentOS developer Fabian Arrotin was extremely happy to announce the release and general availability of the CentOS Linux 7 (1611) images for ARM (armhfp) hardware architectures.

The big news comes just two days after the release of the CentOS Linux 7 (1611) updated installation mediums for 64-bit platforms, which have been rebased on the upstream source code of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 operating system from Red Hat Inc. CentOS Linux 7 (1611) port for ARM is a welcome addition to the growing list of GNU/Linux distributions for single-board computers and embedded devices.

Supporting the popular Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 2, Banana Pi, CubieTruck, and Cubieboard SBCs, CentOS Linux 7 (1611) userland for armhfp includes some exciting technologies, among which we can mention Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, updated uboot images to version 2016.09, replacements of the unmaintained rootfs-resize package with cloud-utils-growpart, SELinux support for Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 devices.

Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3

As one might have expected, the ARM port of CentOS Linux 7.3.1611 is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, which means that the operating system is binary compatible with the upstream OS. While the CentOS 7 userland for armhfp is built from the CentOS 7 GNU/Linux distribution, some of the pre-installed packages have been removed or modified for armv7hl compatible machines.

Please note that the port of CentOS Linux 7 for ARM hardware platforms is now rebased on the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel to also follow the 32-bit (i386) AltArch kernel. For more details and installation instructions, please visit the dedicated wiki page at https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/Arm32. Meanwhile, you can download the images for your SBC right now from the announcement page.