On Wed 06/25/14 11:30AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote: > More often than not, commercial and closed source > applications are built and qualified (for support and guarantee of > functionality) against several very specific OS and library versions. It is > rare, in my experience with this, that any of these are up-to-date versions > of Red Hat or Red Hat derived distributions.
In my experience, Red Hat is often the first, if not the only, supported OS for a commercial Linux application. This is due to the aforementioned lifecycle support and predictable ABI/API. > one unsupported platform is as good as the other, with the caveat that one > needs to pay attention to the ease of management as well as other things. Walking the well trodden path provides ease of management. I don't want to deploy a custom OS stack and have to throw my hands in the air when I hit a difficult bug that brings operations to a halt. I like hardware support. I like talking to the systems engineers. I have support on both Red Hat and CentOS (SL too). Deploying things like InfiniBand and pNFS is easy and commercially supported with RHEL. > This is why stateless machines, booting an instance with a particular OS for > a particular job, is a *far* more reasonable and workable approach than Stateless is cool, but I choose my battles. Supporting multiple OS platforms is not a reasonable use of my time. If the other-OS application really is the end-all-be-all, then maybe, in a VM. I do have to check out Docker. > Err ... no. The center of mass of the market has moved on to the faster I'm saying that you shouldn't change the base OS and its APIs, but _do_ install the latest languages and applications in a modular way. Win-win. Programmers get to choose the latest tools, with a solid base for those software builds, plus hardware support. Cheers, -- Gavin W. Burris Senior Project Leader for Research Computing The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
