perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

NB:  This is not a re-post from two years ago.

 

Last week, Red Hat announced that it has ceased distributing the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the public and barred its licensees from doing the same.  This closes the loophole it left open that made Alma Linux and Rocky Linux (and, originally, CentOS) possible, or at least easier, in the first place.  The maintainers of Alma and Rocky have indicated that Red Hat’s actions make their ability to maintain them more-complicated but should only have a minor impact on their release processes.

 

For our part:

 

Support for CentOS 7 will continue until it reaches end of life next June.

 

Support for perfSONAR on Alma and Rocky in their EL8 and EL9 flavors remains unchanged.  While that support is currently considered beta, we will remove that designation once those builds have seen wide-enough use outside the development team to be considered stable.  We do not anticipate major problems with either.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Linux will continue to 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 the officially-supported distributions.

 

Support for any forks of RHEL will be considered if they turn into viable distributions and the perfSONAR community appears to be headed for a critical mass of adopting them.

 

Our support for Debian and its derivatives will remain unchanged.  As part of an upcoming reorganization of our Docker containers, we may start basing them on a Debian-derived distribution to avoid instability caused by upheaval in the EL-derived world.

 

The perfSONAR team has an in-person developers’ meeting scheduled for late next month, and this will be a topic of discussion.  While we understand that, like two years ago, most of you are still trying to find your way through this, early feedback on where you’re headed will help us make decisions about what to support and get that support in place in a timely manner.

 

As always, if you have questions or comments, please drop us a line.