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
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