Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Released

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-bridges-hybrid-multi-cloud-deployments-latest-version-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7

by gtirloni • 9 years ago

80 81 9 years ago

redhat.com

lima11• 9 years ago

Really happy with my move from Ubuntu LTS to CentOS 7.

QA is so much better. I had so many production breaking bugs with Ubuntu, especially on bare-metal.

RPM packaging is more fun than DEB. I'm even using it for application deployment with tito[1].

Even the software deployment story got better thanks to the Software Collections (https://www.softwarecollections.org). Rock solid base OS and an up-to-data application stack.

CentOS on the servers + Fedora desktop is a great combination, since you can re-use your whole build infrastructure and skills for your workstations.

[1] https://github.com/dgoodwin/tito

gtirloni• 9 years ago

Well, kind of up-to-date application stack. If you worry about security fixes, SL repositories don't usually have the latest versions. E.g. PHP7 repo still has 7.0.10 [0]

Re: stability and QA, couldn't agree more. I only briefly used Ubuntu LTS in production back in '10 and it wasn't a fun experience. I'm sure it has improved but RHEL/CentOS (almost) never lets me down in that regard.

0 - https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities...

bubblethink6• 9 years ago

Re: stability and QA, couldn't agree more.

While generally all LTS distros are quite good these days, I've found that, unsurprisingly, features that are developed heavily or owned by a single distro end up being rocky. RHEL has a lot of things that are not as heavily used elsewhere, and they are far from production quality. For eg., their lvm thin provisioning feature, is pretty rough, and had some very obvious failure cases that could even lead to data loss. I'm guessing that no one uses thinp in production.

lima11• 9 years ago

For PHP, you'd want to use IUS instead: https://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/7/x86_64/r...

Source repo: https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg/php71u

For security reasons, I'm directly building the packages from Git. Works like a charm, and I don't have to include many different third party repos or introduce additional security dependencies.

Generally, Red Hat backports security fixes without incrementing the version number (though that doesn't seem to be the case here).

cjsuk3• 9 years ago

This. Our CentOS 6/7 deployment has been completely uneventful! Ubuntu going back to 10.04 LTS was hell.

ashark3• 9 years ago

QA is so much better. I had so many production breaking bugs with Ubuntu, especially on bare-metal.

Is it (Fedora) much better on the desktop? I dumped Win10 a couple months ago to go back to Ubuntu for the first time since PulseAudio broke everything horribly and I swore off Linux on the Desktop forever (haha), and I was shocked to find that the UIs of both Gnome and KDE have if anything more rough edges than when I last saw them as far as usability goes, performance (UI responsiveness mainly) is generally mediocre to poor, and that both are at least as unstable/buggy as before (KDE significantly worse than Gnome in that regard, though neither's good).

I'd consider jumping ship to an RPM-based distro for the first time since 2004 or so if the desktop experience is less... well, bad, frankly. Going back to Win10 isn't an option. What a garbage fire.

noir_lord• 9 years ago

Xubuntu to Fedora XFCE spin was entirely unexciting in terms of change, I like unexciting when it comes to the OS I use for my livliehood.

Gnome 3 is still a dumpster fire and KDE got so bad as packaged that the devs felt the need to do Neon.

KDE hasn't been good imo since 3 and Gnome since 2.

I'm an XFCE user because of the Gnome 2 debacle though I've considered MATE a few times there isn't anything about XFCE remotely bad enough to make me seriously consider a switch.

cjsuk3• 9 years ago

Gnome is just total garbage as is windows 10. They both drove me to OSX which I admit merely carries the crown of being "the least crap".

I really want gnome2 back but fixed and as a first class citizen, not a fork that the big vendors wish would go away. That had some mileage.

willtim4• 9 years ago

Try something simple like i3

dylan-m2• 9 years ago

Not sure about KDE, but Fedora's version of GNOME definitely works better than Ubuntu's version of GNOME. Because of their valiant efforts to keep Unity from changing at all for six years, Ubuntu's desktop has a peculiar hodgepodge of software versions and unnecessary patches. There's a sense of teams of developers pulling in opposite directions from each other with your computer straining in the middle. Hopefully will get better in a year or two. On the other hand, a lot of what's been going on around GNOME has been about how stuff fits together, along with backend changes that have been getting more and more polished in Fedora but aren't really there in Ubuntu yet. Kind of depends on your system (and whether you have strong opinions about search-as-you-type), but in my own experience I've found that Fedora just feels sturdier as a result. More designed, in a number of ways.

Also its boot splash is the coolest. That's probably the real reason.

ploxiln• 9 years ago

The Mate desktop is pretty good. It's Gnome 2, maintained and polished, and ported to gtk+3 in the latest release.

But there are a few better options than the latest KDE or Gnome. These projects have built houses of cards in their attempts to be the biggest and user-friendliest, sacrificing too much stability and quality.

hungerstrike• 9 years ago

I love Windows 10. I run the pro version and I develop cross platform web and mobile apps with it.

What went wrong for you?

My biggest problem was that I had to turn off Defender because it was causing some delays with the real time scanning.

dima55• 9 years ago

I've had the opposite experience: compared to Debian, RPM distros feel like they were built by children. I guess YMMV :)

dboreham• 9 years ago

In my experience they wax and wane. We're on our fourth distro in 10 years. Change has mainly happened because "it don't work with the new hardware we just bought". Currently on Ubuntu fwiw.

dozzie• 9 years ago

RPM packaging is more fun than DEB.

How so? From my experience, these two are equivalent to a high degree and don't differ much, and I've built a lot of both.

abrookewood• 9 years ago

Interesting - I did the exact opposite. Red Hat have a habit of removing packages that compete with their commercial offerings, which forces you to either compile from source or to install from other repositories - for example, they removed Apache ActiveMQ because they offer JBoss AMQ.

This starts to become annoying because all of a sudden you have multiple update processes to keep everything up-to-date, whereas previously, you had one. After being bitten by this at least twice, I shifted everything to Ubuntu.

rodgerd5• 9 years ago

Notable point: Red Hat are effectively declaring btrfs has no future.

From the release notes: "The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

clem• 9 years ago

I wonder if they'll be supporting ZFS on Linux now that it's gaining momentum?

ty_a2• 9 years ago

I highly doubt Red Hat will ever touch ZFS. Oracle and Red Hat have a very tenuous relationship.

I hope Red Hat will support bcachefs though. I think it's the most promising alternative FS.

mattl• 9 years ago

Unlikely, given the license of ZFS and its incompatibility with the GPL

merb• 9 years ago

didn't they settled to xfs long ago? Isn't the default root fs on fedora xfs?

bubblethink6• 9 years ago

Yes, btrfs was a tech-preview, meaning use if you want with no support or future guarantees. It has been officially dropped from future plans now.

rodgerd5• 9 years ago

XFS went through a tech preview -> support -> default over the RHEL 5/6/7 lifecycles.

The fact btrfs has been yanked from tech preview would tend to suggest feedback has been so bad that they believe it can never make it to being supportable.

akulbe2• 9 years ago

I wonder why that's the case? is it not well-maintained?

lima11• 9 years ago

Running btrfs in production is still a nightmare in 2017.

At least the random kernel crashes stopped.

With proper care and feeding, it won't run out of metadata either but you need to monitor it closely and run nightly balances. Which probably kill your SSD.

Documentation sucks. Get used to monitor the btrfs IRC channel closely and deduce what to do and what not to do on which kernel version.

It works well for very particular use cases (file server with few random writes and much duplicate data). Cannot recommend it otherwise. Even Docker runs more stable on XFS.

rodgerd5• 9 years ago

Have a look at the RAID 1 implementation.

If you have a 2-disk mirror and one disk fails, you can mount the remaining disk one more time to try to recover.

If you try and mount it a second time it is marked permanently read-only and can never be recovered. You need to dump the data and rebuild from scratch.

It's 2017. It's been in development for almost a decade, and getting the simplest RAID case correct hasn't worked.

quicksilver03• 9 years ago

That's bad, Btrfs has really grown on me, especially the ability to mix drives of different sizes in a RAID configuration.

XFS is just not flexible enough, I don't like to be unable to shrink a partition once created.

It looks like I'll be back to ext4 and various kludges then.

chungy• 9 years ago

Mind that btrfs will remain in RHEL7, but as soon as you go to RHEL8... you could just build your own kernel. Or use the centosplus kernel which will almost surely include it (as they've been including various RH-disabled modules for RHEL6 and 7 already).

moonbug• 9 years ago

Or, assuming you get over your partition resizing fetish, just stick with XFS. It's as close to bulletproof as you'll find on Linux.

rodgerd5• 9 years ago

That's bad, Btrfs has really grown on me, especially the ability to mix drives of different sizes in a RAID configuration.

That's nice, but the fact RAID 1 still is implemented with critical defects might help understand RH position.

flyinghamster3• 9 years ago

One thing that is souring me on RHEL+clones is Red Hat's habit of yanking drivers for SAS and SCSI controller cards. On my home file server, CentOS 7 is the end of the line unless I buy a new HBA.

Then there was the old Dell server at a customer's site that we were planning to use for a development/testing system. It had a perfectly functional PERC/4e RAID controller, but Red Hat yanked the driver in 7.0, never mind that Ubuntu Server works perfectly on the same hardware. We ended up picking up a cheap refurbished desktop to use as the development box.

lima11• 9 years ago

Some examples would help. So far, any example of drivers disappearing that I encountered were due to quality issues.

flyinghamster3• 9 years ago

The abovementioned PERC/4e is an example. The driver was deprecated in RHEL6, and gone in RHEL 7.

The card in my home server is an Intel SASUC8I reflashed with IT firmware, so it's equivalent to an LSI SAS1068E. The driver for that is listed as "deprecated" in 7.

akulbe2• 9 years ago

This is one reason I don't run RHEL on bare metal, but only on a VM(ware) host. I know it's not free, and not cheap, but I'd rather not hassle with issues like that.

virtualwhys• 9 years ago

ESXi is most definitely free if you can live without the enterprise features.

For example, in many setups a max of 8 cores per VM is sufficient, and IIRC there are no longer memory or storage limits for the free tier.

The web admin (which replaces phased out vCenter admin interface) is pretty decent. Between that and the cli you're sorted for most non-enterprise use cases.

But yeah, if you need vMotion and all the other orchestration features, the licensing is...far from free.

flyinghamster3• 9 years ago

Indeed, I considered the idea of installing Ubuntu Server and then putting CentOS 7 into a KVM guest. In the end, just using a desktop machine for the testing system was more practical.

I would have been far happier if they retained the driver as an "unsupported" option with a warning during installation, rather than flat-out removing it.

rwmj• 9 years ago

The driver loss has even caused problems for me working for Red Hat :-/ I had to build versions of virt-p2v on top of RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 so that our own customers could virtualize older physical machines with the HP/Compaq RAID controllers: http://oirase.annexia.org/virt-p2v/RHEL-7.3/

smegel• 9 years ago

Nice.

Mojah• 9 years ago

A very big change, although not widely reported, is the update to OpenSSL 1.0.2k, which brings ALPN to RHEL & CentOS.

This in turn allows HTTP/2 on Chrome to work again if you're using Nginx as a TLS proxy on your server.

Some more info here; https://ma.ttias.be/rhel-centos-7-4-restores-http2-functiona...

lima11• 9 years ago

Another big change is SELinux support for overlayfs, which means you can use the overlayfs2 driver with Docker without disabling SELinux.

toyg• 9 years ago

Does it come with python3 installed by default, like recent Fedora?

Spiritus• 9 years ago

No. And it won't be until (at least) RHEL 8. It's available from SCL[1] and IUS[2] though.

[1] https://www.softwarecollections.org [2] https://ius.io

carwyn• 9 years ago

It's also in EPEL now. SCL is cumbersome by comparison for basic usage.

apearson• 9 years ago

Anyone know how much a lag CentOS is normally behind Red Hat releases?

wyoung22• 9 years ago

About a month:

  7.0: 4 weeks
  7.1: 3 weeks
  7.2: 4 weeks
  7.3: 5 weeks

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Released

Related Stories