[Beowulf] HPE to acquire Cray

[Alexander Antoniades]

I just wanted to point out that Fedora, while having a lot of volunteers is
primarily driven by Red Hat employees, so I don't think forking it is a
viable option. If you want to get an idea of what forking RHEL/Centos would
be listen to an Oracle Linux rep who will be more than happy to tell you
how much trouble they have untangling Red Hat's obfuscated kernel blobs.
Red Hat invests a lot of money to keep their ancient franken-kernels
running. I heard it took on the order of 5000 man hours to backport
Spectre/Meltdown patches to RHEL 6.

 Also this just what was given up when they announced the end of Scientific
Linux recently, so if that's what anyone is thinking I think it makes more
sense to reach out to them to see what it would take to keep that going.

I wish that Debian was the default choice since they can't be bought and
every other commercial Linux entity is financial precarious, which makes
them less reliable than Red Hat to me. I don't doubt that it's doable but
it would have to be the norm for a lot of us to start doing that since so
much of the HPC specific tooling seems to be targeted to RHEL/Centos/SL.

I had the same concerns regarding Centos, but I feel we're save in the near
term and if it does start go sideways it will happen slowly enough that
there should be enough to time to figure something else out.

Thanks,

Sander

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 7:26 PM Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 17 May 2019 10:10:16 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:01 AM Jonathan Aquilina
> ><jaquilina at eagleeyet.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Redhat and IBM im worried as I use Centos big time and then the only
> thing I can think of is forking fedora and roll a rolling distro if they
> decide to pull the plug. But we have to wait and see.
> >
> >in regards to centos, that's another ugh moment.  i was looking to see
> >when centos was going to drop v8.  to me the the one wiki page they
> >put up reads like a big whine about how much work there is and people
> >should stop asking.
>
> This happens every time, people expect CentOS to ship at the same time
> as RHEL and it has always been a couple of months later is my
> recollection, perhaps with at least one case being longer.
>
> While being part of Red Hat helps with some things it is still a large
> amount of work, and the move to Fedora infrastructure will be causing
> some new issues.
>
> As for the Red Hat / IBM issue, time will tell I guess.  Anything
> major though would likely mean a bunch of Red Hat employees suddenly
> being available and so it might be worth taking a wait and see
> approach.
>
> >and intel just released a linux distro (i didn't read into it much),
> >so i wonder if openhpc might move to that and drop centos.  in my view
> >centos's future is uncertain, which makes me unhappy :(
>
> Clear Linux has been around for at least a couple of years, the
> biggest (and obvious) issue is that it is aimed at Intel processors
> and anyone using AMD is likely to have various issues (not to mention
> the unlikelyhood of having Clear Linux run on ARM or Power for those
> who that matters).
>
> And with yet another Intel security issue released this week that is
> causing performance issues jumping onto an Intel focused distribution
> may not be an action to take without a lot of thought.
>
> Unless someone (with a realistic plan for the manpower and
> infrastructure) forks Fedora / CentOS then realistically I suspect
> that most valid althernative to Fedora / CentOS / Red Hat is Debian
> (unless one really needs corporate support) given the either Ubuntu or
> openSUSE also have the risk of a takeover.
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