Following RHEL, Oracle Linux 7 Brought To ARM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Following RHEL, Oracle Linux 7 Brought To ARM

Following Red Hat promoting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for ARM under general availability, Oracle with their RHEL7-derivative, Oracle Linux 7, also now supports ARM...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Linux-7-ARM

[schmidtbag]

Not that I'm complaining, but why? ARM is fantastic for stuff like web hosting and file sharing but not a whole lot else. I would argue Oracle's most relevant Linux ARM-compatible products are Java and MySQL, neither of which are ideal on a platform with limited processing power. There's also ZFS or btrfs, but for server usage I can't imagine they'd be all that useful, considering most ARM devices don't have the bandwidth for multiple drives, and again, limited processing power.

[Kendji]

If your a company and your a owner of something like Cavium ThunderX, then this will indeed be a good thing. A company like Red Hat throwing support behind the ARM platforms means you might get their services on that platform, this is a business move, though will it pay off? The advantage of running ARM over a x86 competitor is that you save cost on the energy bill, for a hobbyist running a few RPI3 servers this will be off little consequence. Though someone considering buing tens if not hundreds of ThunderX servers and already a Red Hat customer, this might mean cost savings in the long term.

[starshipeleven]

Not that I'm complaining, but why?

The article cites Cavium ThunderX, which is (up to) 48-core part with 135W of TDP, 512GB ram, a ton of PCIe lanes, 16 sata ports and 8x 10GBit ethernet ports (or better), so ok it's not a quad-CPU bigass computing xeon server, but it still is not a "platform with limited processing power" by a long shot.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thunderx-48-arm-cores/2

The X-Gene 3 (another SoC mentioned) is trading blows with high end xeons. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11189...tarts-sampling

Don't get yourself misguided by the mention of Raspi 3, ARM isn't just for low-power.

[microcode]

For what it's worth, they don't really need much in the way of reasons to do this. They get it basically for free by being a RHEL derivative

[mike44]

sure for oracle not to support it would have been work.

[Delgarde]

For what it's worth, they don't really need much in the way of reasons to do this. They get it basically for free by being a RHEL derivative

Not quite for free... as far as I know, they're not shipping the actual RHEL binaries, so to support additional architectures like ARM, they need to provide their own build infrastructure for those platforms. But yeah, certainly a lot of the work has been done for them...

[microcode]

Not quite for free... as far as I know, they're not shipping the actual RHEL binaries, so to support additional architectures like ARM, they need to provide their own build infrastructure for those platforms. But yeah, certainly a lot of the work has been done for them...

I mean, sure there's the minuscule incremental cost of adding one more cross toolchain to their build servers, and the even smaller cost of additional storage, but I think that's still "basically free".