WireGuard kernel module

[ryan-m-williams]

Hi Folks,

What is the usual release schedule for patches from a newer kernel version? I see that linux kernel 5.6+ will have wireguard added in and hopefully that would be a production ready stable release.

First post so feel free to tell me how wrong I am... i.e. CentOS doesn't patch the 3x kernel with new features.. only security and bugfix.


Thanks!

[TrevorH]

The next time there will be major revision of the kernel version will be in RHEL 9.

CentOS 7 was released with kernel 3.10.0 and still uses that today and will do until it goes EOL in 2024.

CentOS 8 was released with kernel 4.18.0 and still uses that today and will do until it goes EOL in 2029.

RHEL 9... who knows. It's not due for another 2 years.

You might get lucky at a RHEL 8 point release and Red Hat might backport the module to the 4.18 kernel but I wouldn't really hold my breath waiting for it. Those happen about every 6 months.

See https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting

[ryan-m-williams]

Thank you for your help!

[TrevorH]

Actually there is one current solution that will work, the ELRepo third party yum repo has an elrepo-kernel repo (disabled by default) and that has a kernel-ml-5.6 package in it that has the wireguard module. It means replacing the distro kernel with a very very recent mainline kernel but it's available now.

I've also just seen some talk about seeing if it can be brought into other kernels via different routes but those need to be explored more first.

[ryan-m-williams]

Thanks for that tip, is there thread where I can follow progress / effort on adding it to CentOS 7 or 8?

[TrevorH]

As far as I can gather, it would appear that ELRepo will be adding a kmod package to their repos for el7 and el8. You can see the current status from https://elrepo.org/bugs/view.php?id=990 (el8) or https://elrepo.org/bugs/view.php?id=989 (el7)