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Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

news.fnal.gov

41–50 of 144 posts

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#41

Obviously stability is the most important factor for the people running nuclear experiments so they choose RHEL. Nevertheless, if I were them, I would consider trying Nix or Guix to potrntially turn the configs/builds into comparably strict math and making these reproducible.

Config can also be made reproducible with VM images, containers, home-built packages, configuration-management tools (ansible, puppet, …) or a mix of all or some of them.

Nix/Guix is no silverbullet.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#42
post #22

How are these long-term support Linux distros able to provide LTS for the thousands of packages they include? If a security bug is discovered in an old version of RabbitMQ do the distro maintainers learn Erlang/OTP to patch the bug?

Alma/Rocky are just rebuilds of RHEL. And afaik, Red Hat does employ people to do that.

And, the package selection in RHEL is much smaller than in, say, Debian or Ubuntu [1]. There are the popular EPEL repositories with lots of extra packages, but these are community-maintained on a best-effort basis.

[1] And I think the Ubuntu 'guarantees' only apply to the 'main' repository, not the MUCH larger 'universe'.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he paid to develop it? Serious question, my CentOS boxes have been running for years and I'm not looking to upgrade so I'm not up to date.

He does not develop it whatsoever. Really all he does is talk, so basically zero development value. He certainly likes to take credit though for all the work all of rocky's volunteers do.

Yes, Gregory Kurtzer personally helped in development (primarily the packaging / tools during 8.3 and then 8.4). I know, I was there lol. For example, see the commit log to the early set of Rocky Linux devtools:

https://github.com/rocky-linux/devtools/commits/main?after=f...

"All he does is talk" is unfairly dismissive. We all have our roles, and Greg's is not release engineering.

The "taking credit" bit is an unfortunate misconception, media likes to attribute the entire project to gmk since he's a notable personality, but he himself does not.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#44

All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma. Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around? I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcea…

> Alma Having just played through the F.E.A.R. games that name gives me weird feelings.

I love that game, but the first thing that came to mind was the satellite dish array somewhere in the desert.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#46

All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma. Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around? I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcea…

It depends. As a counter example think of Scientific Linux [0] which was also an RH clone supported by Fermilab and CERN. It eventually got replaced by this "obscure" distro called CentOS.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#48

All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma. Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around? I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcea…

> Alma Having just played through the F.E.A.R. games that name gives me weird feelings.

Having just watched through undone series that name also gives me weird feelings.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#49

All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma. Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around? I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcea…

Rocky is "winning" if by "winning" you mean more widely used. Here are some graphs charting usage through EPEL statistics: https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com . The source used to generate the graphs is available at https://github.com/brianclemens/rocky-stats , however please be kind to the Fedora servers and don't download the stats database too often if you use it. Also Rocky Linux is far larger in terms of community siz…

Wow: those Alma Linux curves look nice. The Rocky Linux trends are definitely more aggressive, but they look a little bit tulip-fever-ish.

Also noteworthy is the linear nature of the RH progress.

I welcome any further interpretation in a similar (or contradictory) vein to my thoughts.

Re: Fermilab/CERN recommendation for Linux distribution

#50
post #11

All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma. Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around? I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcea…

I have insights. Alma is done by professionals for professionals (the hosting industry). Those guys were behind CentOS, and are running 70% of the internet. Rocky is an unpaid community effort.

No.

Alma Linux is done by CloudLinux, and still uses their infrastructure, secure boot certificate, etc (according to their page at https://web.archive.org/web/20221208102246/https://wiki.alma...). They have never had anything to do with CentOS.

Rocky Linux _is_ community oriented, and _is not_ beholden to a specific company, but it is not necessarily unpaid. The majority of the most active contributors to the project are being paid by their respective organizations (CIQ, OpenLogic / Perforce, etc) to do so.

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