Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta Released

[AdamW]

Responding my own question: anaconda will be version 19, not 20.. =/

it branched from a 19.x build, but it doesn't exactly match the F19 or F20 installers. It has a lot of the fixes that have been found in F20 testing backported, and it has other fixes that RHEL QE have already found in Alpha and internal beta candidate testing. It will likely get a _lot_ of other fixes between Beta and Final. So it'll include stuff that, in Fedoraland, is in 19, 20, 21, and who knows, maybe 22+ (I have no idea what the expected timeframe between Beta and final is for RHEL 7).

This is one reason we didn't used to say what Fedora build RHEL was 'based on'; key bits of it really aren't clearly 'based on' any given Fedora, including the installer and the kernel. I'm kinda surprised we decided to go ahead and say 'based on F19' in the RHEL 7 Beta press release, honestly, it's really not quite that simple...

[Licaon]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will include XFS as the default file system, scaled to support file systems up to 500 TB.

Umm and this

[phred14]

I was hopping for the 3.12 kernel with the new schedule algorithm and much improved radeon performance.. (I use scientific linux in my desktop)

I'm sure they're not done patching the kernel, yet. I'm running RH6.4, and I'm sure I've seen post 3.0 features in that 2.6.32.xxx kernel.

[edgan]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will include XFS as the default file system, scaled to support file systems up to 500 TB.

Umm and this

This is a huge WTF in my book. They have supported XFS for a long time, but this seems more like some middle manager saying we have to have the selling point of 500tb support BY DEFAULT. Support for a 500tb filesystem is very niche. XFS doesn't even try to protect your data. With it's XOR style you can end up with silent corruption in files, very easily. It is also slow on deletes. At least in the past it caused bugs with lots of desktop software, because of different semantics. I expect they will get another wave of that with this new default on RHEL Workstation.

On the flip side, any large scale shop using RHEL will probably be kickstarting or something like it. There it is very easy and low overhead to change the default. Though I am sure this is going to bite lots of people till they learn of this.

Another little note from the release notes, ext4 only supports 50tb filesystems, but also supports 50tb files. Where as XFS supports 500tb filesystems and only 10tb files.

[Serge]

Well, several community distributions already default to 64 bit versions but even otherwise, the enterprise linux market is very different. If you want to use things like virtualization or high end databases etc on a large number of systems, you want 64-bit anyway and it takes several years after a new release of RHEL for customers to seriously deploy it. If you are conservative on hardware architecture, you will likely stick with an older version. Most of the customers I expect would be still quite happy with RHEL 5 and even EL4. The subscription model of Red Hat is not based on selling new versions since subscriptions are not tied to any particular version (ie) RHEL 7 will be a free upgrade to existing customers and they can choose whatever supported version they want.

@Eric, Updating to a new upstream version even around the beta cycle stage is very expensive because of how QA and certifications processes are affected by such a change. Red Hat typically cherry picks hundreds of changes from newer versions anyway so the baseline version is often pretty misleading.

Thanks for the explanation. I forgot how insanely long the RHEL support cycle is. "Stay with an older version if your hardware isn't supported by a new version" makes more sense in that context.

[RahulSundaram]

This is a huge WTF in my book. They have supported XFS for a long time, but this seems more like some middle manager saying we have to have the selling point of 500tb support BY DEFAULT. Support for a 500tb filesystem is very niche

It is a bit of niche but it is also the kind of niche that Red Hat gets a bulk of its revenue from. These kind of decisions are not based without solid demand from the customers and many of them are already running into Ext4's limitations. Dave who is the upstream maintainer of XFS works for Red Hat and he did make a good case for XFS being the default

https://lwn.net/Articles/476263/

XFS continues to be improved heavily. So I suspect some of your complaints are very much outdated. In the last several years, it has become a very solid fs.

[Licaon]

@redhaties: Why bother to ask me about my keyboard layout (dvorak) if the installer does not actually set it? :facepalm: Back to a reinstall because aparently I'm dropped in runlevel 3 at boot and I can't type any password right (!?!?!?) although I keep pressing the qwerty buttons in order.
This reminds me of Vector Linux back in 2007, iirc, the installer asked me at least 3(!!) times about my keyboard layout yet after reboot I would get a default qwerty layout to login with. :-|

[RahulSundaram]

@redhaties: Why bother to ask me about my keyboard layout (dvorak) if the installer does not actually set it?

I guess you found a bug in the beta release Have you reported it? If so, provide the bugzilla link. Otherwise report it.

[Licaon]

I guess you found a bug in the beta release Have you reported it? If so, provide the bugzilla link. Otherwise report it.

Oh, it's there since January ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=903776 )

[torsionbar28]

I am surprised that there is no 32-bit x86 support. I know this is anecdotal evidence at best, but I seed Debian and OpenSUSE torrents, and 32-bit looks to be more popular than 64-bit with Debian downloaders and almost as popular as 64-bit with OpenSUSE downloaders.

I don't see a problem with the lack of 32 bit distro. x86-64 chips have been on the market for ~12 years now. Twelve years is an eternity in the IT world. It has been many years since a 32-bit-only x86 machine was even available for sale. The only exception I can think of is low-power embedded systems, but even there ARM has replaced x86 as the platform of choice. The number of folks still running 32 bit x86 is very very small.

Additionally, 32 bit RHEL6 is supported until 2021, with security fixes until 2024. So the 32 bit RHEL customers, however few they may be, can still go another *decade* if they choose to with a supported RHEL OS.