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Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

rockylinux.org

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Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#51

Post by pabs3 »

jabl wrote: post #41
thebeardisred wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'm sorry this has been your experience. I'm one of the Red Hatters who's been working behind the scenes to get this over the finish line. I do say my genuine thanks for your earnest expression. The version and ABI guarantee is not for everyone. At the same time some folks around these parts know that I'm "not an apologist for running an out of date kernel". I can assure you that everything shipped in the forthco…

> The version and ABI guarantee is not for everyone. As an aside, that kABI guarantee only goes so far. I work in HPC/AI, and the out-of-tree drivers we use like MOFED and Lustre drivers would break with EVERY SINGLE RHEL minor update (like RHEL X.Y -> X.(Y+1) ). Using past form here because I haven't been using RHEL for this purpose for the past ~5 years, so maybe it has changed since although I doubt it.

Is anyone trying to get those drivers upstreamed?

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#52

Post by pabs3 »

worthless-trash wrote: post #39
gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

Disclaimer: I'm very involved in the kernel part of this for $company. The RHEL kernels themselves do see many improvements over time, the code that you'll see when the product goes end of life is considerably updated compared to the original version string that you see in the package name / uname -a. There are customer and partner feature requests, cve fixes and general bug fixes that go in almost every day. The fir…

How much of the RHEL kernels is stuff that isn't in Linux mainline or LTS?

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#53

Post by skywal_l »

jabl wrote: post #40
publicmail wrote: post #23

Maybe a dumb question but how do non x86 boards normally boot Linux images in a generic way? When I was in the embedded space, our boards all relied on very specific device tree blobs. Is the same strategy used for these or does it use ACPI or something?

The x86 platform uses a plethora of platforms services under different names like UEFI/ACPI/PCI/(ISA plug-n-play back in the day)/APIC (programmable interrupt controller and evolved variants thereof)/etc. that allows the generic kernel to discover what's available when it boots and load the correct drivers. ARM servers do the same with SBSA (a spec that mandates things like UEFI, ACPI etc. support) etc. I think there…

Maybe I'm wrong but isn't it what SBI[0] is for?

[0] Supervisor Binary Interface

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#54

Post by speakspokespok »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #19
copperx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to confess that my early experiences with RedHat as a teenager and dealing with the nightmareish RPM dependencies soured me from the distribution. I went to Debian and then its many descendants and never looked back; APT seemed magical in comparison. I assume they have a package manager that resolves dependencies well now? Is that what an RPM wrangler is?

rpm dependencies has been a solved problem with yum (and now dnf) for about two decades.

Yum was borrowed from yellow dog Linux.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#55

Post by Arnavion »

beeflet wrote: post #30
publicmail wrote: post #23

Maybe a dumb question but how do non x86 boards normally boot Linux images in a generic way? When I was in the embedded space, our boards all relied on very specific device tree blobs. Is the same strategy used for these or does it use ACPI or something?

I think windows ARM laptops use UEFI?

publicmail was asking about ACPI vs DT, not UEFI. Using UEFI and ACPI/DT are orthogonal; DT-using devices can also boot from UEFI if the firmware provides it. See https://github.com/TravMurav/dtbloader for example.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#56

Post by Arnavion »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #44
Arnavion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All RISC-V consumer boards running Linux also use DT. RISC-V is also working on getting ACPI but primarily for the sake of servers, just like with ARM where ACPI is primarily used for servers (ARM SBBR / ServerReady). ARM Windows laptops only use ACPI because Windows has no interest in DTs, but under Linux these devices are still booted using DT. I don't know for sure, but the usual reason is that these ACPI implemen…

> so supporting them on Linux requires more effort than just writing up the DT. More effort then producing unique images for every board?

Yes. See https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/edk2/tree/dtbloader-app?t... for example.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#57

Post by homebrewer »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #16
gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

> Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good security back port effort but why on earth start off with a kernel that is using a walking stick. Because old software is battle-tested and reliable. Moreover, upgrading software is ever a pain so it's best to minimize how often you have to do it. With a support policy of 10 years, you just can't beat RHEL (and derivatives) for stability.

RHEL's kernel — the actual base of the operating system with the largest effect on stability — is not old. It might have a version number from the middle of the last century, but there are so many massive backports in there that in a few years time after release it gets closer to the latest mainline than to its original version. Don't expect too much from it.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#58

Post by microtonal »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #16
gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

> Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good security back port effort but why on earth start off with a kernel that is using a walking stick. Because old software is battle-tested and reliable. Moreover, upgrading software is ever a pain so it's best to minimize how often you have to do it. With a support policy of 10 years, you just can't beat RHEL (and derivatives) for stability.

Having had to use those kinds of machines often as a user, it is a total pain. For some reason, these enterprise distributions end up being used a lot on scientific and machine learning clusters. You have to deal with 5-10 year old bugs that are solved in every other distribution already and you have to jump through hoops to make modern software run.

For me it always felt like the system administrators externalizing the cost on the users and developers (which are the same in many cases).

Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#59

Post by microtonal »

rubitxxx10 wrote: post #18
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good security back port effort but why on earth start off with a kernel that is using a walking stick. Because old software is battle-tested and reliable. Moreover, upgrading software is ever a pain so it's best to minimize how often you have to do it. With a support policy of 10 years, you just can't beat RHEL (and derivatives) for stability.

I’m old. I used one of the original boxed RH distros. It was cool then. That was almost 30 years ago. I know they give back to Linux, and I’m thankful for the enterprises that pay for it because of that. It’s not a bad company, though it’s strange that you could be a great developer and lose your position there if your project gets cut, unless another team picks you up, from what I hear. But when Linus created Linux,…

I’m old. I used one of the original boxed RH distros. It was cool then. That was almost 30 years ago.

Does anyone remember glint (graphical UI for RPM) that was part of Red Hat? Must have been Red Hat 4.x or thereabout.

Re: Rocky Linux 10 Will Support RISC-V

#60

Post by homebrewer »

copperx wrote: post #15
gerdesj wrote: post #10

I understand why people use RH and Rocky and even Oracle: the rpm wranglers. However its not for me. My earliest mainstream distro was RH when they did it just for fun (pre IBM) and then I slid slightly sideways towards Mandrake. I started off with Yggdrassil. I have to do jobs involving RH and co and its just a bit of a pain dealing with elderly stuff. Tomcat ... OK you can have one from 1863. There is a really good…

I have to confess that my early experiences with RedHat as a teenager and dealing with the nightmareish RPM dependencies soured me from the distribution. I went to Debian and then its many descendants and never looked back; APT seemed magical in comparison. I assume they have a package manager that resolves dependencies well now? Is that what an RPM wrangler is?

This is a very outdated view. dnf runs circles around apt. Try it out, or at least find man pages on the ole 'net and see what it can do.

Probably the thing I like the most is transactional installation (or upgrades/downgrades/removals) of packages with proper structured history of all package operations (not just a bunch of log records which you have to parse yourself), and the ability to revert any of those transactions with a single command.

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