Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving-present-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta

by ciupicri • 8 years ago

148 123 8 years ago

pksadiq2• 8 years ago

Release notes here: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

For those that matters, MongoDB is not included because it uses Server Side Public License: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

kbumsik• 8 years ago

Also, KDE is removed and GNOME + Wayland is default.

pksadiq2• 8 years ago

Also, KDE is removed and GNOME + Wayland is default.

Yeah, and the important part is that migrating from RHEL 7 with KDE to RHEL 8 is not supported: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

c0l0• 8 years ago

Interesting takeaways for me: They still use yum (instead of dnf) for managing packages, and default to nftables as the firewalld backend, while even Fedora (afaik) is still using iptables.

apsivam2• 8 years ago

yum is now based on dnf

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

ciupicri3• 8 years ago

Too bad it doesn't come with Python 3.7, only 3.6. Fedora 29 managed to switch to 3.7, although it was released just two weeks ago.

rwmj9• 8 years ago

Later versions of Python will be supplied as modules. So will Python 2. They are parallel installable with "system-python" which remains at 3.6 for the lifetime of RHEL 8. (Note that in general modules are not parallel installable, but in this one case it is).

apsivam2• 8 years ago

I'm more surprised by the fact that no Python is installed by default on a Red Hat distribution

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

mikece• 8 years ago

I wonder how many companies will either not upgrade to RHEL 8 or seek to leave RHEL because of the acquisition by IBM.

ocdtrekkie• 8 years ago

Most companies are more pragmatic than this. Change adds risk, and companies which select RHEL are relying on it's stability and enterprise support, and will likely continue to do so, until there is a real, material reason to reconsider, such as IBM changing the pricing or service agreement.

(Note as a comparison, individuals who distrust Microsoft moved their projects off GitHub when it was acquired, but most businesses, even those in direct competition with Microsoft, such as Google, did not.)

Novashi2• 8 years ago

About as many that left Github when it was acquired by Microsoft.

craftyguy3• 8 years ago

Judging by the surge of new users on alternative platforms (gitlab), that's at least a couple of thousand.

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2018/06/04/devs-are-flooding-to-gi...

Edit: Your silly comparison deserved a silly response. Customer bases and services between the two are not similar.

williamstein2• 8 years ago

There is more optimism about the future of Microsoft than the future of IBM. Evidence: Microsoft's stock price has nearly tripled during the last 5 years, whereas IBM's has dropped almost 40% during the same period.

gaius• 8 years ago

The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

rwmj9• 8 years ago

So I work for Red Hat and the truth is no one will know until after the acquisition, but there are certainly no plans for that, nor have I heard anyone even discussing such a thing. CentOS is a valuable part of Red Hat and an important part of keeping users in the ecosystem even if they're not paying us, so it wouldn't really make any sense. IBM aren't stupid (despite nonsense that people write online), and Red Hat is a cash machine and they'd be stupid if they messed with a proven model which works.

tapoxi2• 8 years ago

It would do damage to the brand, and then you'd see developers fork Fedora and build their own RHEL-like "enterprise Linux".

kbenson4• 8 years ago

IBM has never struck me as that clueless about open source, and I imagine Red Hat management would fight that as much as possible realizing how much of a long term strategic blunder it would be.

reacharavindh• 8 years ago

CentOS is being used by a lot of HPC shops, academia and research units like one where I administer a HPC.

For the number of cores that HPC shops run, the bill would become FAT real soon if we have to pay for OS. I'd imagine that if IBM messed with CentOS, it'd be called out for being incredibly dumb about RH business, and there would emerge an open fork of RHEL that is not owned by IBM like CentOS is.

To give you an idea, we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like. If IBM touches CentOS, the whole domino falls and we start looking for alternatives.

LinuxBender• 8 years ago

Regardless of who owns Redhat, they still have to provide the source RPM's for most of the packages. The best they could do is change the build format enough and often enough to make it painful to repackage.

I don't envision them doing this however. That would force a lot of people away from Redhat based distros and guarantee barring conversion to RHEL entitlements.

walrus01• 8 years ago

From the people I know using huge amounts of centos in production, they're not going to pay for RHEL, if centos becomes non viable they'll be switching to debian-stable and debian-testing.

tapoxi2• 8 years ago

I don't think "but IBM sucks" is a good enough reason to change an entire infrastructure away from RHEL/CentOS.

spicyusername3• 8 years ago

I don't think any serious Enterprise will leave until they're giving a reason that's more than the acquisition itself.

So if Red Hat continues doing good by their customers, things will continue business as usual.

gnufied2• 8 years ago

Yay finally 4.18 Kernel in RHEL.

fulafel2• 8 years ago

Is there anything public on release date aims?

carwyn• 8 years ago

When it's ready. If there's one thing Red Hat have been pretty good at it's being conservative and not worrying too much about schedule slips.

ty_a• 8 years ago

I don't think that Red Hat announces release dates for RHEL. At least I don't remember one in the last 10 years.

wyoung2• 8 years ago

RHEL 7 took 6 months to go from the first beta to the first release. Don’t hold your breath.

j1vms• 8 years ago

Thought for a moment I read IBM Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, anyone else?

IshKebab• 8 years ago

Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain and too many other technical breakthroughs to list all share a common component - Linux

Erm what? Only two of those are built on Linux. If there's too many to list at least don't list unrelated technologies.

ape42• 8 years ago

Anyone know what AI and blockchain it has?

wyldfire• 8 years ago

Rust, python 3.6, great stuff!

Shelnutt2• 8 years ago

gcc 8.2! Being on gcc 4.8.5 for RHEL 7 instead of 4.9 was a minor pain point for some c++11 or newer libraries when developing. Nice to see them jump all the way to the 8.x series.

Also great to see xfs gain COW support in RHEL, they are working to make up (in features) for dropping btrfs with xfs. We'll see how stratis works out.

MikGue• 8 years ago

gcc 8.2 is also available for RHEL 7: https://developers.redhat.com/products/developertoolset/over... It's included in the subscription.

Conan_Kudo5• 8 years ago

Btrfs has been removed

I'm still incredibly sad about that, especially as Btrfs has become a really solid filesystem over the last year or so in the upstream kernel...

Reference: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

williamstein2• 8 years ago

Indeed, Btrfs is uniquely capable and important. It has lightweight snapshots of directory trees, and fully supports NFS exports and kernel namespaces, so it can easily solve technical problems that currently can't be easily solved using ZFS or other filesystems. Btrfs is also used now for ChromeOS's Crostini Linux application container.

SEJeff• 8 years ago

bcachefs is another "competitor" to btrfs: https://bcachefs.org/

But Redhat is going all in with stratis: https://stratis-storage.github.io/

justizin• 8 years ago

Notable: Btrfs is used for all of ChromeOS and the crostini container is just another volume.

It's incredibly robust, really confusing why RH would be pulling this.

rwmj9• 8 years ago

I know, that broke libguestfs too :-( Btrfs was the only Linux filesystem that let me create an 8 exabyte virtual filesystem in a reasonable time.

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/nbdkit-for-loopback-pt...

cwyers• 8 years ago

What's the use case for an 8 exabyte virtual file system?

ape42• 8 years ago

Previous Hacker News thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771

zeotroph• 8 years ago

Do they include other file systems which can provide data checksums? The linked stratis doesn't seem to have that feature, did they patch the underlying XFS? There don't seem to be that many filesystems with that capability yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Fil...

vetinari• 8 years ago

No, they plan to implement dm-integrity target as one of available dm layers.

See section 9.2.2 in https://stratis-storage.github.io/StratisSoftwareDesign.pdf

moonbug• 8 years ago

If it's only been "solid over the last year" it ain't solid.

langdon3• 8 years ago

Really not an expert here but Red Hat did acquire and open source VDO from Permabit which has similar functionality AIUI.

ofrzeta3• 8 years ago

As far as I know VDO only provides compression and deduplication. So no snapshots like in Btrfs and ZFS, although you can use LVM snapshots. Also no RAID features.

Conan_Kudo5• 8 years ago

I use subvolumes, snapshots, and send/recv functionality for cheap replication of data. Sometimes even on RAIDed disks!

There are only two file systems with that feature set today: Btrfs and ZFS. I personally prefer Btrfs because it's way more flexible and shipped with the Linux kernel.

ofrzeta3• 8 years ago

I guess it depends on what Btrfs features you are using. I remember SUSE who are using Btrfs as a root fs in the enterprise distro restricting its use to a subset they consider stable.

On the Btrfs status page https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status you can see that the developers themselves consider several features "mostly ok", which is probably not an assessment most filesystem users will find reassuring.

Conan_Kudo5• 8 years ago

I would actually be okay with Red Hat applying the same restriction SUSE did.

For what it's worth, this is the feature set SUSE offers: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15/#TechI...

I would be absolutely okay if Red Hat applied the same restrictions.

ghevshoo• 8 years ago

Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain...

Bingo!

pjmlp6• 8 years ago

Damm, I had unikernels on my card. :)

rwmj9• 8 years ago

Not in RHEL 8 but I'm working with a student on this. There's a rather general non-technical article here:

https://next.redhat.com/2018/11/14/ukl-a-unikernel-based-on-...

setquk2• 8 years ago

This made me cringe so hard when I read it.

Sounds like a IBM Watson promo already :D

lima3• 8 years ago

Red Hat marketing was already playing buzzword bingo before they got bought :D

joe_hills• 8 years ago

I'm excited to see Apache bumped to 2.4.35 with HTTP/2 support.

Also, PHP has been bumped from 5.4 to PHP 7.2, which will be extremely nice to have out of the box.

lotyrin• 8 years ago

They didn't really have a choice, PHP runtime versions have aggressive EOL dates these days.

pjmlp6• 8 years ago

They might, but ISPs still aren't in a hurry to support v7.

hartmel• 8 years ago

If you accept community repositories, https://ius.io/ (sponsored by rackspace) provides very up-to-date packages for Apache and Haproxy.

ofrzeta3• 8 years ago

Maybe they'll include Apache 2.4.37 in the final release, so we can also get TLS 1.3.

jcadam• 8 years ago

The linux box sitting on my desk at work is running RHEL6 (which is really starting to get super annoying). My IT dept is just now starting to roll out RHEL7.

mixmastamyk3• 8 years ago

One place I worked for had a similar setup. I just installed the latest Ubuntu and ssh'd into nearby boxes when I needed something from them.

No way I'd tolerate a desktop almost 10 years behind.

billfruit• 8 years ago

In our place we still have boxes on Rhel 5, some even on Rhel 4. But Redhat did keep the things more or less the same visually over all these years, unlike Ubuntu which seems to change its look and feel bit too much.

kokey• 8 years ago

That RHEL6 will still be supported with security and stability patches until 2020.

spicyusername3• 8 years ago

People can be snarky at Red Hat for being slow, but this is the exact reason why.

If your company has the engineering prowess to maintain the latest and greatest, that's great. Unfortunately most large enterprises just don't move at that velocity which is who Red Hat is trying to support.

rayiner• 8 years ago

It also includes a new TCP/IP stack with Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control, which enables higher performance, minimized latency and decreased packet loss for Internet-connected services like streaming video or hosted storage.

I suspect Red Hat didn't rewrite the TCP/IP stack, so can someone translate this from marketing into nerd? Google doesn't seem to know.

dijit• 8 years ago

BBR is just an algorithm that tries to figure out the best sending rate of TCP packets. So you don't have to wait for every ACK after a PSH. it was added the the linux kernel a couple of years ago, good to see it in RHEL.

maxmouchet• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control#TCP_BBR

chr15p2• 8 years ago

As I understand it there was a new TCP/IP stack added to the linux kernel back somewhere around 2015/2016 that couldn't be backported to the RHEL7 3.10 kernel without breaking the kernel ABI that red hat tries to only change with major versions.

So new to rhel TCP/IP stack not to linux as a whole.

amluto• 8 years ago

Wow, they based on Linux 4.18! Good for them! I was worried they’d pick 4.14 or earlier, which would have been regrettable in terms of keeping the speculation attack mitigations maintainable.

stuff4ben• 8 years ago

I wonder why not 4.19 which I thought was an LTS kernel?

justincormack• 8 years ago

Red Hat don't use the upstream stable kernels, they totally maintain their own. As they backport things not just do fixes, I guess it doesn't matter.

rwmj9• 8 years ago

Red Hat backports features aggressively and is one of the largest contributors upstream. The kernel version or whether it's LTS upstream doesn't matter.

muhbags• 8 years ago

Finally no Python 2.7 anymore!

langdon3• 8 years ago

Well, not exactly, you can still get it, it just isn't default :) https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/14/python-in-rhel...

jdoss• 8 years ago

Here is a download link to the DVD iso (rhel-8.0-beta-1-x86_64-dvd.iso) for those that are interested:

https://red.ht/2ROrd80

Spivak• 8 years ago

The big takeaway for me is that they consider Podman ready to use because it's honestly amazing. A fully featured container engine that doesn't need any elevated privileges or a central daemon -- using just Linux namespacing features. Once people realize the implications of having containers just being something you can run like any other program with zero fanfare I expect adoption to explode.

sjellis• 8 years ago

I suspect that Windows and macOS support going to be a big impediment to adoption of RH's container tools. Fedora has become a really good OS and Silverblue is going to be another level of awesome on top, but I don't see huge numbers of developers switching.

curt15• 8 years ago

There still seems to be some confusing overlap in their tools. For example, what is the difference between "buildah" and "podman build"?

vrutkovs• 8 years ago

`podman` keeps the compatibility with Docker CLI params, so `podman build` is a wrapper around `buildah bud`

fredsanford• 8 years ago

I guess if you cross a Red Hat and a Big Blue dinosaur a big purple dinosaur could be the result...

https://i.etsystatic.com/5700633/r/il/ea2ba9/1552167872/il_5...

cwt137• 8 years ago

With the AppStream, does that mean Software Collections is no longer needed?

langdon3• 8 years ago

Not really an "either or". However, AppStream provides similar functionality. See this post: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/15/rhel8-introduc... for more info.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta

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