
Red Hat Unveils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 - bbzealot
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/6/red-hat-unveils-rhel-7
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nailer
So:

* Docker

* XFS as default filesystem, btrfs available

* systemd and .service files replacing the duct tape of overlapping services and shell scripts

* Normal RHEL stuff like SystemTap support

More info:
[https://access.redhat.com/site/sites/default/files/pages/att...](https://access.redhat.com/site/sites/default/files/pages/attachments/rhel_whatsnewrhel7beta_techoverview_.pdf)

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Florin_Andrei
> _Performance Co-Pilot_

The name is identical to a tool I used over a decade ago at SGI. Is this a
distant descendant thereof?

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ucsdrake
Most likely, does the tool you remember look similar to
[http://www.performancecopilot.org/](http://www.performancecopilot.org/) ?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Yup, same one. Cool.

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gnoway
The XFS-as-default change is surprising. Does anyone know what drove this? I
don't keep up with XFS development on Linux, so I don't understand why it's a
better choice vs. EXT4 for RHEL7 than it might have been for RHEL6.

edit: cleanup wording.

~~~
nailer
XFS has been stable on Linux for over a decade (since SGI Linux, which was
RHEL with XFS, in the early 2000s). btrfs while having some design advantages
over XFS and ZFS is still too new for most of Red Hat's customers.

~~~
mbreese
I'm one of those people who had to deal with an XFS corruption about ten years
ago, and the recovery process was messy - to say the least. At least with
ext4, the recovery is easier to manage.

I'm still scarred by it.

This actually makes me happier with my decision to use FreeBSD and ZFS for a
recent file server. I'll still use RHEL/CentOS for client nodes, but they'll
all be using the ZFS export for storage.

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rodgerd
Eight years ago Joyent suffered high-profile, irretrievable data corruption
with ZFS. By your own metric I'm surprised you're using that.

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mbreese
Of course I'm going to have a bad taste in my mouth for XFS. Because it
happened to _me_. At the time is was particularly frustrating because XFS was
claimed to be very stable and should be used over ext3(? I don't remember if
ext4 was out yet). Our group ended up moving all of those machines over to
ext3/4 and we were quite happy with the results.

I remember when Joyent had their problem, and it made me hedge on ZFS for
quite a while as well. Some time working with both Solaris and FreeBSD
implementations in production was enough to change my mind.

I'm sure that XFS now-a-days is much more stable - Redhat wouldn't make it the
default filesystem if it wasn't. Just because I had a bad experience with it
many years ago doesn't mean that I won't use it, but I will evaluate if I
_need_ to.

But, I honestly wonder how much longer it will be the default with Btrfs
coming along quickly.

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Alupis
This is looking to be an impressive release.

Switching to XFS as the default filesystem.

Improved MS Active Directory integration

Container support (is it Docker? seems too early for RHEL to integrate
Docker..? maybe it's just LXC?)

systemd is a big win (although a hot topic)

CentOS 7 shouldn't be lagging too far behind. The CentOS team recently got
taken up with RHEL, so I think we can expect a CentOS update soon (can't
wait!).

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JohnTHaller
It's LXC. LXC has been around since 2008 (before Docker existed, since Docker
builds atop it). And LXC isn't tied to a for-profit company, so RHEL would be
more likely to include it.

~~~
Alupis
Was my thoughts exactly. Seems odd to put Docker into a RHEL release,
especially since docker only 1.0'ed yesterday. RHEL usually goes for rock
solid stable (typically older/matured) packages... LXC seems the natural
fit... I could see Docker in RHEL 8 or something...

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sciurus
Docker was added to RHEL 6. Red Hat can move faster than you think. :-)

[http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/11/26/rhel6-5-ga/](http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/11/26/rhel6-5-ga/)

~~~
JohnTHaller
Wow. I stand even more corrected. Additionally, it's pretty cool that they
pushed it into RHEL 6 given the slow upgrade paths of folks that use RHEL.

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listic
Which platforms does it run on?

Official press release is so high-level, it even skips the 'mundane' details
like that. And the documentation isn't ready yet:
[https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-
US/Red_Hat_E...](https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-
US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/)

~~~
Nux
x86_64 and PPC afaik

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rwmj
The precise platforms are: x86_64, ppc64 (big endian) & s390x.

I think what is more interesting are the platforms that are _not_ in that
list. Internally we build for 32 bit i686, ppc (32 bit) and s390, but AFAIK we
don't release those. We also don't build for ARM 32 bit (but aarch64 will be
in future[1]).

Of course this is a lot less than Debian, but we have to carefully choose what
we are able to support for customers. This is not a throw-it-at-the-wall
approach.

[1] [http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/red-hat-64-bit-arm-
deve...](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/red-hat-64-bit-arm-developer-
preview-jon-masterss-keynote-at-linaro-asia/#content)

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Nux
Thanks for not realeasing the 32bit arch, makes package building and
management considerably easier!

~~~
btgeekboy
Not so fast - I believe CentOS is planning a 32-bit SIG. I'm sure it won't get
near the adoption a Red Hat blessed distribution would get (even considering
how 32-bit is on its way out), but it exists.

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Tomte
Great! I can't wait for CentOS. Well, I have to. :-)

~~~
gtirloni
Thanks for the recent cooperation between Red Hat and CentOS, we may not have
to wait much!

[http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/1/red-
ha...](http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/1/red-hat-and-
centos-join-forces)

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gatehouse
Anyone have a rough idea of when/if this will effect the Amazon Linux distro
for EC2?

Glad they went with MariaDB, I've had some small problems with certain
versions of the mysql jdbc being incompatible with MariaDB due to some kind of
protocol quirk, but generally I've been planning as if MySQL development will
converge on this project.

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sciurus
Looks like EPEL for RHEL7 is progressing.

[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/epel7beta-
faq](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/epel7beta-faq)

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fragmede
Anyone taken a look at how to get sources for this?

RedHat's got some convoluted "we can't store source in git" policy going on.

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cwyers
It's not really convoluted. Their policy is to only publish SRPMS and
tarballs. Really straightforward. The reason behind it (to make Oracle's life
harder) is also pretty straightforward, even if you disagree with it.

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fragmede
Sure, but they're not even publishing SRPMS any more.

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m4r71n
It seems that all source code will be published through CentOS's repositories:

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/7Server/en/os/README

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herge
I heard that the only way to safely run docker is to have it secured by
SELinux, which is available in RHEL and Core OS.

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peterwwillis
Funny, but I didn't know CentOS got acquired by Red Hat. They claim they're
keeping a separation between the RHEL team and CentOS team, but CentOS
development is basically organized, run and funded by Red Hat now.

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mwcampbell
Does anyone here know which graph driver Docker is using in RHEL7 (aufs or
devmapper)?

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Nux
Devmapper (thin lvm/dm-thin) AFAIK, AuFS is not supported by RHEL at all.

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nodata
404

Edit: works now

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nailer
Looks like they took it down then fixed it again.

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Miademora
Got the same 404 and after refresh it works. Maybe its overloaded or buggy

