perfSONAR Announcements

[Mark Feit <>]

As many of you are aware, Red Hat announced last December that all support for CentOS 8 will cease on December 31, 2021.  At the time of the announcement, the perfSONAR team was in the process of a long-overdue port to that distribution; that project was halted pending an assessment of the post-CentOS landscape.  During our recent developer meeting, the team had some discussions and would like to share the decisions made about operating system support:

 

CentOS 7 will continue to be fully-supported until its originally-scheduled end of life on June 30, 2024.

 

Alma Linux 8 (https://almalinux.org) will become fully-supported and the team’s primary environment for development, build and distribution.  Our RPM repositories and ISO images will be built using this distribution.  The first Alma-based release will be perfSONAR 5.0.

 

Rocky Linux 8 (https://rockylinux.org) has a small amount of catching up to do relative to Alma but is shaping up to be a solid alternate.  As it should be bug-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we will be revisiting it regularly and anticipate supporting running the Alma-built RPMs there.

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Oracle Linux 8 will be supported on an advisory-only basis.  This means the team may pass along any information arising from informal experimentation or reports from the community.  Supporting these distributions will not be a priority, although we will integrate patches from the community that make perfSONAR work there and don’t cause problems for those we do support.

 

CentOS Stream will not be supported, but we may use it internally as a way to make support for distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 more timely.

 

CentOS 8 will not be supported in any fashion.

 

There are no changes in current or future support for Debian and Ubuntu.  There is work underway to make both first-class citizens in our development environment rather than the ports they have been previously.  This should make perfSONAR on those distributions a better product.

 

We will, as always, have documentation and programs available to help with the migration from CentOS 7 to the new systems.

 

 

If you have questions or concerns, please drop us a line at .

 

Thanks!

 

--The perfSONAR Development Team