Okay, this is a serious question. For me, not an official RH position. In my time in HPC, nodes were baked with a specific image and then that basically never ever got updates. As I came to that as a sysadmin from other areas, I found that somewhat horrifying, but it seemed pretty universal. Have things changed such that applying patches regularly (like, more often than once a month or so except in emergencies) is a thing?

Not much, but in our setup the image is not something which can evolve or change over time. This practice has some very practical reasons though.

Scientific applications can be very picky about the libraries they use or need, down to minor version since the results they produce are very, very precise. Even if not very accurate, you need to know the inaccuracy. An optimization in a math library can change this and, it's not something we want. Also program verification and certification generally includes versions of the libraries used.

Piecewise upgrades are a no go too. Your cluster generally can't work well in heterogeneous configurations (due to library mismatches) and draining a node is not a straightforward task (due to length of the jobs). If your cluster has a steady stream of incoming jobs, reducing resources also means queue bloat and recovering it is not easy sometimes. If you want to drain the whole cluster, it takes almost 2-3 weeks so, you lose ~1 month of productivity. When you start an empty cluster to churn its queues, its saturation takes time so, it doesn't go to 11 directly.

Also, worker nodes are highly isolated from the user's point of view. No users can log-in, only known people submit jobs, etc. Unless there's a rogue academic trying to do nefarious things, the place is pretty safe and worry-free. In past 15 years, we got two rootkit infections due to a server which can be world-accessible by design. Other than that, nothing ever got infected.

At the end of the day, this approach has some valid reasons to be alive. It's not that we're a bunch of lazy academics who refrain from applying good system administration practices. :D

Addendum: The images generally get updated when new hardware is added, since new processors tend to work better with newer kernels. Also sometimes we bit the bullet and update all the cluster at once. XCAT helps a lot in this space. If your image is sane, you can install batches of 150+ servers in 15 minutes while sipping your coffee.

Right, so: for this case, CentOS Stream will be virtually identical to the CentOS Linux RHEL rebuild.

We will certainly try. Need to mirror a repo, freeze it and update our installation infra so it looks to the local repo rather than the national mirror.

All repo settings will look to local repo so we'd have no dependency problem or version creep if we need to install an additional package.

Didn't completely think how to handle the occasional emergency update though.

Also, we need to compile in some packages. Hope they won't break. High performance stuff needs optimized/customized compilations.

I just want to add: Hope that the packages in CentOS stream won't end up too cutting edge for the scientific software community. These communities move slow due to stability requirements. We'll certainly see but it might be another potential problem.

I can totally reassure you on your last concern: everything that goes into Stream is approved for a minor release in RHEL. That's not changing at all. Cutting edge is still Fedora's turf. :)

Thanks, because that last point would be actually breaking in some cases.

I think HN is the only place where you can casually provide feedback and get answers about an OS project from one of the core people in it. Fun!

Glad to meet you, BTW.

To be clear, I'm RHEL and CentOS _adjacent_, rather than actively _in_ them. But I think (rough launch and more than a few communication issues) aside this is generally gonna be positive.

I think that's because HPC users are largely non-technical developers. We changed a DHCP schema at one point and had a bunch of angry academics in the IT office because their Matlab scripts were broken. Many of them had been hard coding IP addresses into the code itself.

The login nodes on our cluster (UChicago) can reach uptimes over a hundred days (which my tmux sessions love).

Seems like the kernel was last updated in May.

    $ uname -r -v
    3.10.0-1127.8.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 13 10:45:47 CDT

No, they haven't changed in my experience.

We used SLES like that on our HPC. SLES and RH will run just fine without subscriptions if you don't plan to update them.

The license for RH precludes you from running unlicensed RH, if you have any licensed RH. I don't believe SuSE does the same.

Oracle already has a clone that performs an in-place conversion of an installed CentOS 7 system.

There is a page describing the conversion: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/

They have a shell script to convert a CentOS install to Oracle Linux, so you can buy support if you want.

The converter only works with versions 5, 6, and 7.

It does not work with CentOS 8. It would be nice if that could get updated.

>0racle already has a clone that performs an in-place conversion of an installed CentOS 7 system.

"Out of the frying pan into the fire"

There are two types of people: People who haven't used Oracle yet, and people who will never use it again.

And I'll forever hate them for what they did to Java (and in setting the precedent that APIs can be copyrighted).

What have they done, lets see:

- Brought MaximeVM of research and creating GraalVM

- In the process of adding value types to Java

- In the process of adding support for explicit SIMD in Java

- In the process of adding co-routines to Java

- Added type inference support

- Added pattern matching

- Added record types

- Integrated J/Rockit support for JIT caches

- Made Flight Recorder available in OpenJDK

- In the process of making AOT compilation work, instead of requiring you to fork money for a JDK with AOT compiler like Sun used to do

- Integrated almost pauseless GC with support for TB sized heaps

- Long term roadmap to replace C++ with Java on the JDK, as yet another proof of Java capabilities

- In the process of having a JNI replacement

And plenty more, https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/0

I hope they squash Android Java, Google had the opportunity to buy Sun after screwing them up.

When your company software stack is turned inside-out by Oracle reps to look for unlicensed JVM's on penalty of really big fines (sorry, opportunities to buy more Oracle software) all those nice-to-have features don't seem to matter that much.

Java is like C and C++, plenty of implementations to choose from, including the free beer OpenJDK.

Anything else is just FUD.

> I hope they squash Android Java, Google had the opportunity to buy Sun after screwing them up.

Do you really think that would be a reasonable thing to happen, and good for technology and the world in general? It seems disproportionately punitive, and the "right" thing to happen only if all you care about is watching things burn.

And you haven't addressed the precedent that's been set that APIs are now copyrightable. Do you like that precedent? Do you ever use anyone else's APIs in your daily development, and do you like how that now opens you to huge potential liability? Is all of this worth it just because Google didn't acquire Sun??

They've done all of them because they think it'll allow them to earn more money with less effort on the long run, not because of the sheer love of computer science and research.

Oracle creates cool tech in the legacy of Sun because it impresses the right people who can influence the decision makers.

To recap: "Hey, Oracle's these new toys are capable and fun to use. We can do much more with them. Can you buy these for us, engineers so we can be happy like children again?"

I don't think that's really true. My understanding from talking to people there is that Java funding was increased for so many years despite losing money because Larry Ellison just thought it was cool tech and they use it a lot. Likewise, GraalVM is so well funded largely because it's cool and Oracle doesn't have many cool R&D projects. It's not clear it's all that commercially driven when you observe that so much of it is open source.

That said, their supported versions of Java and Graal are expensive. Some things never change.

Oracle has been in the bed with IBM and Sun regarding Java since version 1.0.

The supported versions of Java and Graal are the same price as any other enterprise product.

They put the effort, someone has to pay for it.

Where are the free beer JIT, AOT and GC implementations for free beer languages that outperform Java?

Do we need to have free beer JIT, AOT and GC implementations for every language?

If I understood it correctly, a programming language has some foundational design decisions (including its memory and execution model) to attack a particular set of problems?

What we need are top level JIT, AOT and GC implementations, anything else is just going backwards.

The people capable of achieving that, naturally have bills to pay.

> What we need are top level JIT, AOT and GC implementations, anything else is just going backwards.

Not always. As I aforementioned in another thread, we also need C/C++, Python, Perl, etc. as is since they fill different roles and attack different problems.

I've written Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP. Had to abuse some of them to fit roles which they're not designed to do. At the end of the day, these languages satisfy different needs and solve different problems in different scenarios. Java wouldn't be able to do all of them. Neither C++, nor Python.

As I said, you may like Java but, it's not the king of every programming language. No programming language is king of everything BTW.

C and C++ development is sponsored by the corporations of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google....

PHP was mostly driven by Facebook needs.

None of them is any different from Oracle.

And apparently you fail to understand who has contributed to state of the art implemetnations of AOT compilation to toolchains like LLVM, hint the companies that HN loves to hate, it weren't weekend and late night coders.

> And apparently you fail to understand who has contributed to state of the art implemetnations of AOT compilation to toolchains like LLVM, hint the companies that HN loves to hate, it weren't weekend and late night coders.

I'm pretty aware that nearly all clang/LLVM development is driven by apple.

On the other hand you apparently fail to understand my point of view about Oracle and Java ecosystem. I'm neither against Oracle nor Oracle's development of Java or Java's development in the interest of Oracle mainly.

I'm only against Oracle's motives about making Java a walled garden and usage of this programming language to extort license money from others.

On the other hand, I personally use OpenJDK runtime countless times every day, knowingly or unknowingly. I'm written Java in the past and have no reservations or bad things to say about it. Contrary to your view about other programming languages, I'm pretty neutral against every other programming language.

> C and C++ development is sponsored by the corporations of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google.... PHP was mostly driven by Facebook needs.

There are no news for me here either. Development of a programming language or any tool with input from its users is a non-issue. Also, every user has needs from the products they use, so they will provide feedback and communicate their needs.

The difference, I want to highlight and highlight again, none of these corporations can use C++ or PHP or Python to extort license money from their customers. PHP is owned by Zend, so they may try. C++ is almost public domain now. LLVM is under apache license. Either way I use GCC which is GPL. Python is 20+ years old and is also almost public domain.

Contributing to a tool to get what you want is different from owning a tool and to use it to extort licensing money is different.

Either way, as aforementioned, I have nothing against Java, contrary to your views against other programming languages.

Haters gonna hate.

> I don't think that's really true. My understanding from talking to people there is that Java funding was increased for so many years despite losing money because Larry Ellison just thought it was cool tech and they use it a lot. Likewise, GraalVM is so well funded largely because it's cool and Oracle doesn't have many cool R&D projects. It's not clear it's all that commercially driven when you observe that so much of it is open source.

I just hope that it's true. We really need that.

Good on them, they stepped in for Sun when no one else bothered to [0], including Google after screwing them up.

I guess the "community" would love to keep using Java frozen in version 6.

[0] - Only IBM considered it, which from these threads people here wouldn't be happy anyway.

Development of programming languages by corporations is not something I object but, all of the stuff told about Oracle here is correct.

They're not a nice entity unless you pay money to them and they're greedy. They always want more. Also, their hardware can fail in strange ways and they'd shrug it off.

I've met with some nice people who migrated from Sun but they all say that the terms they work are draconian.

I like Java too but, developing a nice language doesn't make Oracle good. Don't get distracted [0].

> I guess the "community" would love to keep using Java frozen in version 6.

Python doesn't stop. C++ doesn't drop. Even brainfuck doesn't stop. It'd have prevailed. OpenJDK is one fruit of the project. After removing patent encumbered image processing stuff, OpenJDK just took off. Yes, it's still part of Oracle in a sense but, OracleJDK is compiled from OpenJDK, not vice versa. Again, don't get distracted [0].

[0]: https://calebhearth.com/talks/dont-get-distracted

Here some news for you, check the names of the companies that put money on the table for Python and C++.

IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo

So much better.

However, the governing bodies of these programming languages are independent from the companies themselves, which is different than Java's position.

These companies employ people who contribute to these programming languages. So the model is somewhat different.

I'm not that oblivious about the real/programming world.

It is naïve to think that the employees of the companies aren't driving their employers agenda, regardless how "independent" those governing bodies are.

Of course but, there are sub-committees which melt all the agendas into a single pot and create solutions which makes everyone happy. Also some of these languages have or had BDFLs.

Oracle's governance is different from this. C++ is an ISO committee. Python has a lot of working groups, etc.

Java is much more centralized when you compare with others.

Nope, IBM, Azul, Amazon, Red-Hat, Alibaba, Twitter, Microsoft also seat at the Java table.

Should I also start listing the dark sides of each company that seats at ISO C and ISO C++ table?

Python working groups also need money from those corporations, and Python is yet to provide the performance levels of Java, so much for free beer development.

> Nope, IBM, Azul, Amazon, Red-Hat, Alibaba, Twitter, Microsoft also seat at the Java table.

I know Java has stakeholders but, what I'm trying to say is the table is at Oracle's HQ, not somewhere else.

> Should I also start listing the dark sides of each company that seats at ISO C and ISO C++ table?

A primer would be nice, actually.

> Python working groups also need money from those corporations, and Python is yet to provide the performance levels of Java, so much for free beer development.

I've never alleged that Python takes no money from corporations and, Python doesn't aim the performance of Java. Their byte-code even doesn't get optimized. Instead Python prefers native libraries for performance. SciPy, NumPy, PyTorch and others obtain native performance on any system they run and, it's enough for Python.

No need to move the goalposts and compare apples to oranges. Python is never meant to replace Java. Java is not meant to replace system programming languages like C/C++. You may like Java and it might help you to pay the bills but, pushing other languages around just because they don't fill your needs from your point of view is not the correct stance.

> A primer would be nice, actually.

Microsoft, the evil company over here, that keeps being compared to Oracle. Several C++20 features like Modules and co-routines were driven by their VC++ implementations.

Apple, the company hated over here by bringing the end of open platforms, without it LLVM and clang wouldn't ever exist.

Google, the spying company and forking Linux with Android, the second major clang and llvm contributor.

IBM and Red-Hat, with their own Linux agenda pushing stuff like systemd hated over here, major GCC contributors.

You are missing the whole point with Java, it isn't about Java, rather all mainstream languages just like Java only move forward with dirty money (from HN point of view), but hey it is cool to hate Oracle.

Hint they are one of the first enterprise contributors to the Linux kernel and have been ever since.

Do you also feel like removing Oracle contributions from the Linux kernel?

And none of the companies you're listing here have been at all litigious about those programming stack contributions like Oracle has been. You're disproving the point that you're trying to make here -- Oracle is uniquely bad about this.

Oh, I love being generalized.

All big companies have a number of dirty deeds in their history, that's right. But I'm not a person who generalizes this to overall companies, incl. Oracle.

I personally don't use Microsoft OSes, however I have several licenses since my family uses them. I also have a personal lincense (albeit it's booted once a year) for some odd application I may need if stars align on the Friday, 13th. OTOH, I always have praised them for their ergonomics research, resulting hardware and their choice for keeping Kinect open back in the day. I won't ever trust them but, I'm not delusional.

I don't use Android devices or Chrome. Only some Google services. However day by day, I'm using their services less and contemplating to switch over to something like Proton. Also I loathe them for making pseudo-open stuff and closing it later. However, they're pioneer of software defined network due to sheer size of their networks.

I have Apple laptops and iPhones but, my main desktops/workstations are vanilla Debian boxes and always will be.

> You are missing the whole point with Java, it isn't about Java, rather all mainstream languages just like Java only move forward with dirty money (from HN point of view), but hey it is cool to hate Oracle.

No, I don't hate Oracle per se. I only hate their money greed. Especially the money greed via Java. I've used their ZFS appliances after they acquire Sun. They were nice up to a point. I applaud them for the enterprise ecosystem around their OracleDB. I like how they managed to fuse Sun's hardware with their software. But I don't like their greed. Maybe this greed is required from their point of view, but I don't like it.

Similarly I'm not keen on nVidia's strong-arming everyone and pushing people around. Also I don't like their arrogance. Yes, CUDA is nice, it's the de-facto standard for now but, it doesn't justify bullying others around.

Microsoft also contributes to Linux Kernel, I'm aware who's doing what.

> Do you also feel like removing Oracle contributions from the Linux kernel?

No, but I feel like you may like replacing it with a Java re-implementation running on a bare-metal HotSpot VM.

Not liking a part of something doesn't need to spread all over that thing. Do you leave your car to a junkyard because you dislike the engine sound at a particular RPM? Do you change your PC because its USBs are a little slow to a similar model? Same idea.

I don't think many people who want to use something stable like CentOS, but don't want to pay for a RHEL support contract would want to pay Oracle for RHEL-but-with-Oracle-sprinkles-on-top

Not to mention Oracle is not known to leave money on the table, and if they see they can start charging for Oracle Linux because there's no large well known free version, I wouldn't put it past them.

Put another way, if you jump ship from CentOS because IBM caused Red Hat to change it into a funnel to pay them money, if you landed on Oracle, you might be setting yourself up to do it all over again fairly soon.

> Not to mention Oracle is not known to leave money on the table

You're underselling it: Oracle grab money in a way that I would describe as "aplomb ruthlessness". They've managed to fuck no less than 3 orgs I've worked for.

If they ask you for a license count or how many cores are in use, ignore them. Larry Ellison doesn't need another boat.

Oracle Linux is free with optional paid support.

"Unlike many other commercial Linux distributions, Oracle Linux is easy to download and completely free to use, distribute, and update. Oracle Linux is available under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). Support contracts are available from Oracle. "

https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/027617.pdf [PDF]

never, Ever, EVER trust Oracle. Especially with something as important as an open source product. Evidence: Oracle's Sen. VP Glueck statement that "There is no math that can justify open source from a cost perspective." No chance you'll ever see me running OEL.

> never, Ever, EVER trust Oracle.

Been burned by them before. Not at liberty to give details, but the outcome is that I never choose Oracle for anything for the rest of my career. Even if it would save time and money.

The fact that you aren't comfortable discussing the details of how you were screwed by Oracle, even anonymously on the internet, is really all anyone needs to know about Oracle.

HN is one breach away from lost anonymity.

Are there any license traps in Oracle Linux?

Writing like this makes me very wary of putting Oracle Linux anywhere near my employer's systems

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2992597/law-firm-warns...

https://blog.dbwatch.com/how-to-avoid-oracles-licensing-trap...

Then there's the famous lawn mover quote from Bryan Cantrill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

Can you imagine if they had successfully purchased TikTok?

match made not in heaven but on Oracle Cloud

From their page, does this even read professional? Sounds like some startup wrote it trying to make them look bigger than they're.

Community based sounds better to me.

> But if you're here, you're a CentOS user. Which means that you don't pay for a distribution at all, for at least some of your systems. So even if we made the best paid distribution in the world (and we think we do), we can't actually get it to you... or can we?

In our setup we don't need any add-ons that Oracle brings to the table. We also don't need their greed too.

We only need RH equal of Debian, since the software we use generally have explicit CentOS/RHEL support.

My thoughts exactly. All our workstations and small-ish clusters run CentOS (we don’t maintain ourselves the large clusters so these are not our problem). It’s going to be a huge pain.

I was at CERN when ScientificLinux was created, back then it was actually based in Red Hat, there was no CentOS.

We also used it a lot back in the grid days. :)