[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Mark Hahn]

> > fully usable in a production environment.
> 
> I disagree with this, rather strongly.  The Fedora series has had a 
> number of surprises for admins, for driver makers, for users, and so 
> forth.  SE-Linux, 4k-stacks, glibc changes, etc.  All of these wound up 
> in the supported release (e.g. the one for production environments). 
> Sure you can use it on your systems.  Of course you can.  If something 
> breaks on some commercial code that you might run, are you SOL?  If you 
> don't run any commercial code, and have no liability issues associated 
> with using supported platforms, this is a moot point.

you seem to be conflating "changelessness" with productionworthiness
(or even "stability").

if you have a single-purpose cluster dedicated to some specific package,
then by all means, lock it to whatever release/config/color the 
package's vendor likes the best.

but don't pretend that change across releases means that something 
is somehow not production-worthy, or that its defensible for an app
to depend on the distro, rather than the actual platform (ABI).

> > only means that FC is on a shorter release cycle, and might contain
> > the new puce-and-teal color scheme, which turns out to be a bad idea.
> 
> On the contrary, I don't think SE-Linux is "puce-and-teal color scheme". 
>
>   Nor are 4k stacks (that broke many many drivers).  Yes, FC introduced 

they were all trivially disable-able.  also, what commercial applications
depend on the size of the kernel stack?

> those.  No, it was a significant shock when stuff stopped working.  Is 
> that really production ready?  (e.g. thorough testing and bug fixes so 
> that there will be no surprises)

all you're saying, again and again, is that "production-worthy" to you
means that the machine is configured exactly as your single app-vendor 
wants it.  with this logic, nothing can ever change.  actually, this 
approach is much of the reason that windows sucks so much.

>   Bottom line is (apart from Greg's company) I know of very few 
> commercial software vendors targetting FC-x as a supported platform.  As 

this begs the question of whether commercial apps depend on behavior
or configuration which is not standard on the platform.  in the compiler
world, for instance, dependence on undefined behavior is a bug.

FC is not a platform, Linux is.  I'd be most curious to hear the explanation
of how an app gets to be dependent on RHEL and will not work on other 
distributions which conform to the same API.  or are you claiming that 
there is no ABI?

> support FC-x themselves.  Thats great.  Still doesn't make FC-x a 
> supported platform, or a production grade/ready platform (e.g. extensive 
> testing and burnin against critical components).

forget it.  I'm sorry I bothered.  good bye.