27 Oct
2021
27 Oct
'21
11:08 p.m.
Hello,
As you may or may not be aware, CentOS 8's EOL is 31 December 2021,
i.e. just over 2 months from now. After that date, Red Hat expects
CentOS 8 users to switch to CentOS 8 Stream or to a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux product.
At the moment BitFolk supports the self-install of CentOS 8 and that
is going to be in-place upgradeable to CentOS 8 Stream. And that's
it. That is the current extent of your choices for RHEL-like.
If you're a current CentOS 8 user what do you think you're going to
want to be using after it goes EOL?
It seems likely that there will be demand for CentOS 8 Stream and
later Stream releases, so we'll continue supporting those as best
we can¹.
RHEL itself is now free for use on up to 16 production systems, as
long as you sign up with Red Hat for an Individual Developer
subscription:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-progra…
https://developers.redhat.com/rhel8
We don't currently support the install of that, but if people want
it then we would. You install it like CentOS and then have to put in
your subscription details once it's booted. The same change of
installer and kernel would be necessary since it sees unlikely that
Red Hat are going to back down from disabling everything except KVM.
That does mean that you may not be able to get Red Hat to provide
you with any support ("come back when it's booted using our
kernel").
As far as CentOS replacement projects go, Rocky Linux and
Alma Linux have come to my attention. They aren't currently
supported but could be. They don't intend to drift much from RHEL's
settings so they will also require alternate installers and kernels.
Oracle Linux's installer and kernel continues to support Xen, it is
free for use (charges for support) and otherwise aims to be
binary-compatible with RHEL, like CentOS did. I get a little bit
sick in my own mouth at the idea of working with Oracle, but if
there's paying customers who don't then we will enable that.
So what do you CentOS users want to do?
Cheers,
Andy
¹ Red Hat goes out of their way to disable other virtualisation
methods than their own product, KVM. This means that you can't
currently install or run CentOS/RHEL 8 or later under Xen using
their packaged installer or kernel. It is only possible using the
third party kernel-ml package. Red Hat are the only major Linux
vendor to take this stance and as such we can't promise to always
be able to go against their intentions.
https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2021/02/03/booting-the-centosrhel-install…
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
30 Oct
30 Oct
6:23 p.m.
I found it quite easy to convert to Stream from a CentOS 8 'traditional'
installation (I have never been able to install Stream from ISO without
running into problems), so should I ever need to rebuild my server, I'd
repeat that exercise. Failing that, I'd probably be exploring the Oracle
Linux road.
Thanks
Jamie
------ Original Message ------
From: "Andy Smith" <andy(a)bitfolk.com>
To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
Sent: 28/10/2021 00:08:30
Subject: [bitfolk] Where do current CentOS users want to go after CentOS
8 EOL?
Hello,
As you may or may not be aware, CentOS 8's EOL is 31 December 2021,
i.e. just over 2 months from now. After that date, Red Hat expects
CentOS 8 users to switch to CentOS 8 Stream or to a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux product.
At the moment BitFolk supports the self-install of CentOS 8 and that
is going to be in-place upgradeable to CentOS 8 Stream. And that's
it. That is the current extent of your choices for RHEL-like.
If you're a current CentOS 8 user what do you think you're going to
want to be using after it goes EOL?
It seems likely that there will be demand for CentOS 8 Stream and
later Stream releases, so we'll continue supporting those as best
we can¹.
RHEL itself is now free for use on up to 16 production systems, as
long as you sign up with Red Hat for an Individual Developer
subscription:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-progra…
https://developers.redhat.com/rhel8
We don't currently support the install of that, but if people want
it then we would. You install it like CentOS and then have to put in
your subscription details once it's booted. The same change of
installer and kernel would be necessary since it sees unlikely that
Red Hat are going to back down from disabling everything except KVM.
That does mean that you may not be able to get Red Hat to provide
you with any support ("come back when it's booted using our
kernel").
As far as CentOS replacement projects go, Rocky Linux and
Alma Linux have come to my attention. They aren't currently
supported but could be. They don't intend to drift much from RHEL's
settings so they will also require alternate installers and kernels.
Oracle Linux's installer and kernel continues to support Xen, it is
free for use (charges for support) and otherwise aims to be
binary-compatible with RHEL, like CentOS did. I get a little bit
sick in my own mouth at the idea of working with Oracle, but if
there's paying customers who don't then we will enable that.
So what do you CentOS users want to do?
Cheers,
Andy
¹ Red Hat goes out of their way to disable other virtualisation
methods than their own product, KVM. This means that you can't
currently install or run CentOS/RHEL 8 or later under Xen using
their packaged installer or kernel. It is only possible using the
third party kernel-ml package. Red Hat are the only major Linux
vendor to take this stance and as such we can't promise to always
be able to go against their intentions.
https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2021/02/03/booting-the-centosrhel-install…
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
2 Nov
2 Nov
9:42 p.m.
Hello,
As you may or may not be aware, CentOS 8's EOL is 31 December 2021,
i.e. just over 2 months from now. After that date, Red Hat expects
CentOS 8 users to switch to CentOS 8 Stream or to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux product.
I think I would want to go to Rocky Linux but no nothing about it at present.
However I have a Centos 7 build which is only using MariaDB 5 - I need to run MariaDB 10
right now.
So rather than trying to upgrade MariaDB I may be best to go to Rocky with that also?
Hugh
11:07 p.m.
New subject: MariaDB 10.x on CentOS 7 (Was: Where do current CentOS users want to go after CentOS 8 EOL?)
Hi Hugh,
On Tue, Nov 02, 2021 at 09:42:26PM -0000, Hugh via users wrote:
I have a Centos 7 build which is only using MariaDB 5
- I need to run MariaDB 10 right now.
So rather than trying to upgrade MariaDB I may be best to go to Rocky with that also?
As I don't have a lot of recent experience of running the Red
Hat-like distributions I don't feel able to make any
recommendations. Also of course, Rocky Linux is a very new project
that may not have a future.
I do notice that MariaDB themselves offer a yum repository for
MariaDB 10.x on CentOS 7:
https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/installing-mariadb-10-on-centos-7-rhel-7/
So that would seem to be a way to get MariaDB 10.x on CentOS 7 with
some level of stability.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
3 Nov
3 Nov
10:20 a.m.
Hello Hugh,
November 2, 2021 9:42 PM, "Hugh via users" <users(a)lists.bitfolk.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As you may or may not be aware, CentOS 8's EOL is 31 December 2021,
> i.e. just over 2 months from now. After that date, Red Hat expects
> CentOS 8 users to switch to CentOS 8 Stream or to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux product.
It's still early days, but it seems that there are a few choices available.
I think I would want to go to Rocky Linux but no
nothing about it at present.
However I have a Centos 7 build which is only using MariaDB 5 - I need to run MariaDB 10
right now.
So rather than trying to upgrade MariaDB I may be best to go to Rocky with that also?
Hugh
Firstly as Andy suggested in another post, MariaDB offers a CentOS/RHEL7 YUM repository
for version 10 that you should be able to configure. I use it for a few personal projects,
so that attests to it being easy enough to get going. :-) Here is the official info on
it:
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/yum/
Regarding the future of those of us who upgraded to CentOS 8, and now sit with a few tough
choices to make... At my "/dev/wrk" we use CentOS 6/7 extensively for our legacy
products, so the RH double-down on CentOS 8 came as a major shake-up for us. Thankfully we
were not majorly invested into CentOS 8 specifically, although we were quite a ways along
an upgrade project where we leapfrogged CentOS 7 from 6 (yep, we are still using 6 a lot,
that's the "Enterprise Way" as dodgy as it sounds). Needless to say, this
project came to a screeching halt, and we have now diverted our future development away
from running our SaaS products on full-fat VMs, over to running them in containers
(current flavour-of-the-day being Kubernetes). Hopefully this will mean that we are a tad
more agile in future in absorbing such major changes to the landscape - we were caught out
good and proper! :-)
TL;DR
-----
CentOS Stream:
If you don't mind moving from "boringly stable" to "a little bit
edgy", I would go for CentOS Stream. I upgraded a few CentOS 8 boxes to Stream in
order to test the cross-grade methods, and it all works fine. At the moment Stream is by
and large still based on CentOS 8, so you won't find any binary-compatibility issues.
And if you stick to stuff in the official repositories, it is also highly unlikely you
will find major issues in future.
Rocky Linux:
I like Rocky. I'm not 100% sure whether it will last, but it has garnered quite a bit
of support in the wider industry in the form of sponsorship from AWS, MS Azure and Google.
This makes me confident that it won't be going away soon. It's also governed by a
foundation (a little bit like Debian) rather than a corporate entity, which gives me warm
fuzzies for the future of Rocky. I might be wrong, but at the moment it looks good to me.
Alma Linux:
Very similar story to Rocky, and it works well. The major difference is the governing
model - Alma is supported by CloudLinux, a corporate entity. CloudLinux has been around
since 2009, an indications are that they are a healthy organisation. Therefore Alma Linux
seems to be there for at least the medium term.
Oracle Linux:
'Nuff said. It's there, it's based on CentOS 8 at the moment, Oracle won't
be going anywhere soon. I won't be using it any time soon, but it certainly looks like
a solid alternative on paper. :-/
My take - in situations where stability is not my primary concern, I would be tempted to
go with Stream - the fact that it's a rolling release is certainly tempting. In
situations where stability is key, I would use Rocky because I like its governing model
better than the alternatives (the less corporate shenanigans the better IMHO).
Cheers,
Jan
905
days inactive
912
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Andy Smith -
hugh＠vcsnet.co.uk -
Jamie Stallwood -
jan＠henkins.za.net