Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
Just a couple thoughts on framing this "development": Yasha Karant writes: > Translation -- as a for-profit vendor, IBM does not want to subsidize > a competitor to RHEL that is without fee. I see this move in even worse light. Previously there was mutual benefit and trust between RH and CentOS/SL communities. The collective worked to make the shared system better, RH made money from those that need their hands held, while CentOS/SL community did not need to pay for what they did not need. What RH/IBM have done is to turn that relationship into an *exploitive* one. It has not just cut off the community from the "freeness" (as in beerness). Rather, the community (whatever will remain of it) now *works for free* for RH/IBM as beta testers. Now, for some, I think this new arrangement will be just fine. The "stream" nature of the CentOS new world order may actually be welcome for use some cases. Eg, I use and love Debian "testing" on my laptop. I can imagine those deep in the RH world and who do not already use Fedora on their laptops or workstations will enjoy CentOS Stream (I hear them crying now, "there are tens of us!"). For others, notably "grid" and other clusters and the sea of individual servers that can't afford RHEL but require stability, a new solution must be found. I've always considered Debian far more of a "scientific Linux" than SL. It has the stability and security fix support needed for large stable clusters and services. A switch of course will take effort. Lots of retraining (as someone who hates using RH, I can imagine there is a symmetry in how many RH admins/users think of Debian). Never the less, this development has made me hopeful that the crisis will bring about a better, Debian-oriented scientific computing future. > I suspect that I made the "correct" planning decision to switch to > Ubuntu LTS (until such time as Canonical follows the RH IBM path > ...). Canonical worries me (looking at you, "snaps") but in some sense they already have their beneficial exploitation of Debian (which has a decent level of mutuality) and that puts them kind of in their place. I can not imagine it would ever be worth it for Canonical to abandon Debian as their upstream feed. If they took a model of charging for Ubuntu builds (ala RHEL), it is relatively easy for users large and small to move to pure Debian or to one of the many Ubuntu rebuilds. For Canonical to "pull a RedHat" they'd need to "aquihire" the community leaders. I don't think it is technically possible for Debian to "sell out" like CentOS leadership. They are too numerous and too goverened by strong rules and practices that encode a moral community oriented philosophy. Nor would Debian give up due to funding as SL had to do. Debian actually has a surplus of cash. Likewise, the number of Ubuntu re-builds is too large for Canonical to buy out all of them. So, Canonical are, I think, "stuck". But, in a good way. They are not able to turn the tables on their community in the manner that RH/IBM just did. Well, famous last words, never underestimate the creative amorality of corporations, etc -Brett. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.redhat.com_en_blog_faq-2Dcentos-2Dstream-2Dupdates-23Q12=DwIDaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=FCHZnyuFoWqTM3SyDoXaKAG6aBmlut12Lj80X4nfBUw=4PW9qOS5ATcKxRe0dvVI9Qdzq7vivIRywZU0jKR8298= On 12/9/20 8:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote: If my recollection of the history is correct, CentOS and Princeton EL were separate from SL. CentOS originally was a "volunteer" effort building from RHEL source, with RH personnel monitoring the CentOS "lists" because CentOS had a wider range of an installed base on enthusiast and home user systems, in addition to "professional" systems (such as the HP Zbook laptop workstation that I use). The earlier SL major releases had some differences in the base installed system from EL "stock", whereas CentOS did not. Later major releases of SL essentially were the same in the "base" as EL (in all cases, logos must change). I never worked with the Princeton release. When RH (not Fedora -- real production RH) was an executable installable supported distro, pre-EL, we used that, licensed for free for "personal" use. Prior to RH, I was using Debian (the GNU Linux), and once RH had no executable installable supported distro, I switched to CentOS. I then switched to SL because CentOS was having issues and SL was professionally produced (Fermilab/CERN) with the level of professional support we needed (that is, this list, plus Fermilab SL support staff who would fix some things -- such as inconsistencies or missing components in the standard SL distro -- we do NOT need nor use "commercial cradle to grave" handholding support, unlike the University IT division for which everything essentially is outsourced to for-profit vendors, as part of the USA scheme for public funding of private for-profit entities and wealth transference to the wealthy. With the demise of SL 8 and the purchase of RH and CentOS by IBM, I switched to Ubuntu LTS. If Canonical goes the way of RH, then I suppose I will look at Debian again. On 12/9/20 10:47 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote: Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. I guess that CERN was caught red-handed as well. (wrong metaphor? you wanted "with pants down" or "off guard" or something like that? there is no evidence that CERN was "in" on this change, yes?) They have already started to port their internal systems to CentOS8 according to the recent site report at HEPiX: https://indico.cern.ch/event/898285/contributions/4015535/attachments/2120621/3569557/CERN_Site_Report_-_HEPiX_Autumn_2020_v2.pdf As one may remember, CERN Linux, SL and CentOS only exist because CERN could not agree with Red Hat on the licensing scheme for LHC-scale computing. (I guess, at the LHC scale, even small numbers like $1/license become unworkable). BTW, in other news, I see the CentOS wiki was changed to read "CentOS-8 full updates and Maintenance Updates" from "May 2024 and May 2029" to "December 2021 and December 31, 2021", see https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g=CaCDrxtp7Ka4fRCXAiVCT34Zxxx_VD19P2hQeMXliqs= and https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product-3Faction-3Drecall-26rev-3D122=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g=dx8Ilr6PNf35kZ8hodzZ5JC9z40X9p5iMktTifR_C34=
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
If my recollection of the history is correct, CentOS and Princeton EL were separate from SL. CentOS originally was a "volunteer" effort building from RHEL source, with RH personnel monitoring the CentOS "lists" because CentOS had a wider range of an installed base on enthusiast and home user systems, in addition to "professional" systems (such as the HP Zbook laptop workstation that I use). The earlier SL major releases had some differences in the base installed system from EL "stock", whereas CentOS did not. Later major releases of SL essentially were the same in the "base" as EL (in all cases, logos must change). I never worked with the Princeton release. When RH (not Fedora -- real production RH) was an executable installable supported distro, pre-EL, we used that, licensed for free for "personal" use. Prior to RH, I was using Debian (the GNU Linux), and once RH had no executable installable supported distro, I switched to CentOS. I then switched to SL because CentOS was having issues and SL was professionally produced (Fermilab/CERN) with the level of professional support we needed (that is, this list, plus Fermilab SL support staff who would fix some things -- such as inconsistencies or missing components in the standard SL distro -- we do NOT need nor use "commercial cradle to grave" handholding support, unlike the University IT division for which everything essentially is outsourced to for-profit vendors, as part of the USA scheme for public funding of private for-profit entities and wealth transference to the wealthy. With the demise of SL 8 and the purchase of RH and CentOS by IBM, I switched to Ubuntu LTS. If Canonical goes the way of RH, then I suppose I will look at Debian again. On 12/9/20 10:47 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote: Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. I guess that CERN was caught red-handed as well. (wrong metaphor? you wanted "with pants down" or "off guard" or something like that? there is no evidence that CERN was "in" on this change, yes?) They have already started to port their internal systems to CentOS8 according to the recent site report at HEPiX: https://indico.cern.ch/event/898285/contributions/4015535/attachments/2120621/3569557/CERN_Site_Report_-_HEPiX_Autumn_2020_v2.pdf As one may remember, CERN Linux, SL and CentOS only exist because CERN could not agree with Red Hat on the licensing scheme for LHC-scale computing. (I guess, at the LHC scale, even small numbers like $1/license become unworkable). BTW, in other news, I see the CentOS wiki was changed to read "CentOS-8 full updates and Maintenance Updates" from "May 2024 and May 2029" to "December 2021 and December 31, 2021", see https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g=CaCDrxtp7Ka4fRCXAiVCT34Zxxx_VD19P2hQeMXliqs= and https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product-3Faction-3Drecall-26rev-3D122=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=eMvBVbBFwtBD5Xbw1LErGQIapxF_ioOOJoO-OqCNa6g=dx8Ilr6PNf35kZ8hodzZ5JC9z40X9p5iMktTifR_C34=
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
> > Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. > I guess that CERN was caught red-handed as well. (wrong metaphor? you wanted "with pants down" or "off guard" or something like that? there is no evidence that CERN was "in" on this change, yes?) > They have already started to port their internal systems to CentOS8 according > to the > recent site report at HEPiX: > https://indico.cern.ch/event/898285/contributions/4015535/attachments/2120621/3569557/CERN_Site_Report_-_HEPiX_Autumn_2020_v2.pdf As one may remember, CERN Linux, SL and CentOS only exist because CERN could not agree with Red Hat on the licensing scheme for LHC-scale computing. (I guess, at the LHC scale, even small numbers like $1/license become unworkable). BTW, in other news, I see the CentOS wiki was changed to read "CentOS-8 full updates and Maintenance Updates" from "May 2024 and May 2029" to "December 2021 and December 31, 2021", see https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product=DwIBAg=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=m57TS8KUJogsGkZGVKvoL8D7gIzlEIxZsrqSEhDOgqk=eQQfaXijQiDmBJz_iRNxOctSQXnzptQdtMj7Xk8N340= and https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.centos.org_action_recall_About_Product-3Faction-3Drecall-26rev-3D122=DwIBAg=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=m57TS8KUJogsGkZGVKvoL8D7gIzlEIxZsrqSEhDOgqk=Hgd0S_7BGuuCKHIfyfpJaucFixwNwISvlHKpHhHwg4E= -- Konstantin Olchanski Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
Am 09.12.20 um 01:39 schrieb Patrick J. LoPresti: > Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. I guess that CERN was caught red-handed as well. They have already started to port their internal systems to CentOS8 according to the recent site report at HEPiX: https://indico.cern.ch/event/898285/contributions/4015535/attachments/2120621/3569557/CERN_Site_Report_-_HEPiX_Autumn_2020_v2.pdf Regards, Götz -- Götz Waschk° Phone: +49 33762 77169 Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY ° Fax:+49 33762 77216 Platanenallee 6° E-Mail: goetz.was...@desy.de 15738 Zeuthen Germany smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
With my conspiracy-theory hat on, I suspect the timing of this announcement, a week after the demise of the much-loved RHEL6. -- Andrew C. Aitchison Kendal, UK and...@aitchison.me.uk
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
I agree with your sentiments, based upon several informal discussions I have had with CentOS 8 "adopters". "Supported" RHEL 8 seems to be better -- but are there still issues with EPEL, etc., because of inappropriate sub-system designations (as with the python example you provide)? From what I can tell, Ubuntu LTS is a bit more "adaptable". Given the tool set and source partitions you describe, fortunately, I currently am not porting from source, and compile applications from source only when the "source" has a specification for the actual distro release that I use. On 12/8/20 7:11 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 9:31 PM Konstantin Olchanski wrote: On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 04:39:32PM -0800, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: It has been almost exactly seven years since Red Hat bought CentOS The way I remember it, RedHat approached CentOS lead developers and made them an offer they could not refuse. Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. Nothing from CERN yet. But to sense where the wind is blowing, note how ROOT still do not provide a binary kit for CentOS-8. https://root.cern/releases/release-62206/ Our experiment at CERN (ALPHA anti-hydrogen trapping and spectroscopy) uses CentOS-7 and we are in discussions over upgrading to CentOS-8 or Ubuntu LTS 20.04. All our RaspberyPi machines will probably become converted from CentOS-7 to Raspbian (Ubuntu/Debian). For DAQ and analysis machines, there is a preference for CentOS-8, but if we they tell us now that CentOS-8 is a dead end and in 1 year will will have to upgrade *again*, Ubuntu may become the preferred solution. I'm unhappy with CentOs 8. The primary python 3 is already obsolete, python 3.6, and should have been published as "python36" rather than "pythone3" to allow a compatible "python38" parallel upgrade path. Unfortunately, they've convinced EPEL as well to name packages "python3" for "python36" packages in EPEL 7 and EPEL 8. Guess what fun this causes over in the Amazon Linux world, where "python3" is "python37" and python modules from EPEL can no longer be used safely. Do not get me *started* on "modular RPMs", which have proven very destabilizing for building anything, for which there is no usable documentation on how to build them or resolve circular incompatibilities. And the unnecessary and unwelcome split among the channels "base", powertools", "appstream" and "my uncle's secret ninja repo that RHEL originally refused to publish because you shouldn't need those to compile things we compile in-house", now called "devel" were unwelcome splits. And oh, the "we leave out encryption related components for popular open source tools that we used to publish in RHEL 7" have eaten my development time building up python module tool chains, especially for awx, the ansible tower equivalent. I'm pretty unhappy about it.
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 04:39:32PM -0800, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: > > It has been almost exactly seven years since Red Hat bought CentOS > The way I remember it, RedHat approached CentOS lead developers and made them an offer they could not refuse. > > Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. > Nothing from CERN yet. But to sense where the wind is blowing, note how ROOT still do not provide a binary kit for CentOS-8. https://root.cern/releases/release-62206/ Our experiment at CERN (ALPHA anti-hydrogen trapping and spectroscopy) uses CentOS-7 and we are in discussions over upgrading to CentOS-8 or Ubuntu LTS 20.04. All our RaspberyPi machines will probably become converted from CentOS-7 to Raspbian (Ubuntu/Debian). For DAQ and analysis machines, there is a preference for CentOS-8, but if we they tell us now that CentOS-8 is a dead end and in 1 year will will have to upgrade *again*, Ubuntu may become the preferred solution. -- Konstantin Olchanski Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
It has been almost exactly seven years since Red Hat bought CentOS ( https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.mail-2Darchive.com_scientific-2Dlinux-2Dusers-40fnal.gov_msg01499.html=DwIBaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=k9C3FsK8ruGItyjO2valZJ7PiSyD6dfXo0o_uJDy9vc=hWYvmZ1dB98Fa5LjmQDAIUbm_0aIxLNdps_vUzte8CI= ). I admit this move took longer than I expected. I suppose I was so early I was functionally wrong. The cost of switching to Ubuntu for us is large; we have big investments in RPM and related technologies. I guess we have to start exploring it anyway. Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this. - Pat
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
is there any possibility for scientific linux 8? we are testing centos 8 for several monthes, but scientific linux is much better.
Re: CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
For those who want to be nauseated, here is the essential quote of the post: The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release. CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Translation -- as a for-profit vendor, IBM does not want to subsidize a competitor to RHEL that is without fee. Building RHEL from the source, that IBM RH is required to distribute under the terms of the license from which the source is obtained, is resource prohibitive. I do not know the fate of the next Princeton clone of RHEL. What will the various HEP collaborations do? Will Fermilab/CERN provide internal professional person power (not just grad students and postdocs for whom such support is only as much as their research supervisor requires) to maintain an internal RHEL 8 clone from RHEL source? Given that the public pronouncements were to use CentOS 8 as the RHEL 8 clone in the HEP production environments, and that this is now not "long term" possible (CentOS stream is beta at best -- more or less a Fedora like unsupported cycle), one may be curious as to the future of HEP. It is possible that IBM (that has branches almost everywhere in the nations from which HEP collaborators are housed) will decide for a publicity-gain and tax-write-off to partner with Fermilab/CERN and license RHEL 8 (and 9 and ... ) at either a very reduced fee or for "free". But what about those of us who are not in such a HEP collaboration? I too have heard some nasty comments about Oracle EL 8 in terms of Oracle really using it more or less as a lure with the eventual goal of fund extraction from those who attempt to use the executable distro licensed for free. Also, what about the various professional add-on distros, such as EPEL or ElRepo? I suspect that I made the "correct" planning decision to switch to Ubuntu LTS (until such time as Canonical follows the RH IBM path ...). For those contemplating such a move, the changes are not that drastic, particularly if one "debugs" on a single sample of each class of machine (workstation, server, etc.). I am willing to provide my notes (howtos) that I have garnered for Ubuntu LTS (my machine currently is 20.04.1 LTS, and there is a 18.04 LTS machine that shortly will upgrade-in-place to 20.04 LTS -- both are laptop workstations, not "enthusiast home use" machines, one Dell, one HP). For applications that are standardized for EL (we had these on a high performance compute server with a particular Infiniband implementation, but that machine largely is now obsolete), I am not certain what would be involved in porting -- if the libraries (typically, .so) are available in LTS, this should be not too difficult -- particularly on a set of replicated installs. An additional large question for the community is the future of the X86-64/Nvidia GPU architecture. The latest Fujitsu HPC is ARM based, as are the latest Mac OS machines. Is ARM coming of real use beyond "smart phones" and the like, but as "real computers"? Take care. Stay safe. On 12/8/20 3:38 PM, ~Stack~ wrote: Anyone else on the verge of tears after reading today's CentOS blog post? https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__blog.centos.org_2020_12_future-2Dis-2Dcentos-2Dstream_=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=t2J9jUFVgun90FIMquH4QRfvlPyoP8v5iYSZEcA87_g=-5u1jeYbTrmg0sZScxVN-0qJ1ifC2BEGlmW4_B70SYw= If you don't know CentOS Stream, it's "upstream RHEL". No, not Fedora. Yes, that too is "upstream RHEL". CentOS Stream a rolling release (so good luck getting long term steady kernels/packages) that is trying to be Arch like but with RHEL flavor. It sits in between RHEL and Fedora. It isn't and won't track steady releases like RHEL. It will have things before RHEL, except for security patches which will still come in whenever someone gets around to it. And, no, they still won't tag their security patches as such because they expect you to apply patches (and potentially reboot) at their whim. For those of us in the scientific community who have packages from vendors that standardize on RHEL dot releases, I'm not sure what we're going to do. We have RHEL licensing on the important infrastructure nodes but the hundreds of compute nodes, VM's, dev systems, and misc? Going all RHEL would kill our budget. And I don't care if Oracle Linux is free or how good of a clone it is, you only get burned by Oracle once (and you are usually to broke to be burned a second time). I suppose we can shift nearly all of our infrastructure to Ubuntu LTS but there's a lot still left that I'm not sure we can move to
CentOS 8 EOL; CentOS Stream?
Anyone else on the verge of tears after reading today's CentOS blog post? https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__blog.centos.org_2020_12_future-2Dis-2Dcentos-2Dstream_=DwICaQ=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A=t2J9jUFVgun90FIMquH4QRfvlPyoP8v5iYSZEcA87_g=-5u1jeYbTrmg0sZScxVN-0qJ1ifC2BEGlmW4_B70SYw= If you don't know CentOS Stream, it's "upstream RHEL". No, not Fedora. Yes, that too is "upstream RHEL". CentOS Stream a rolling release (so good luck getting long term steady kernels/packages) that is trying to be Arch like but with RHEL flavor. It sits in between RHEL and Fedora. It isn't and won't track steady releases like RHEL. It will have things before RHEL, except for security patches which will still come in whenever someone gets around to it. And, no, they still won't tag their security patches as such because they expect you to apply patches (and potentially reboot) at their whim. For those of us in the scientific community who have packages from vendors that standardize on RHEL dot releases, I'm not sure what we're going to do. We have RHEL licensing on the important infrastructure nodes but the hundreds of compute nodes, VM's, dev systems, and misc? Going all RHEL would kill our budget. And I don't care if Oracle Linux is free or how good of a clone it is, you only get burned by Oracle once (and you are usually to broke to be burned a second time). I suppose we can shift nearly all of our infrastructure to Ubuntu LTS but there's a lot still left that I'm not sure we can move to CentOS Stream nor can we afford to go to RHEL. Guess we are freezing our conversations about moving away from SL7 and have year to figure it out then make it happen... *sigh* ~Stack~
