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Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

I had the impression that CENTOS7.3 was available on baremetal ARM64 on scaleway since a long time. Is it really new ? Maybe I do not understand what this announce is about.

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CentOS and RHEL are different distributions. CentOS supports 32-bit x86 architecture, for example, while RHEL only supports x64.

My understanding was that CentOS is simply a rebuild of all RHEL packages with the Red Hat branding removed. If there's different arch support tho, then there's probably more to it than I thought.

Well, basically that's right and if they're rebuilding RHEL packages anyway, they can just rebuild them for more architectures. Of course that implies that important packages actually support those architectures. RHEL offers more than just binary distribution, they should support their product, so they decided to go with less architectures than theoretically possible. That's how I see it.

The new is that you can now get a support contract from RedHat for RHEL on ARM64. It has been possible to run it for a long time without such support.

I guess it's now supported. You can buy a support contract from Red Hat and when your ARM server has a problem, they'll help.

RHEL 7 only supported x86_64, so CentOS 7 only "officially" supports x86_64. While AArch64, i386, and other arch builds are available from the AltArch SIG, they aren't maintained by the core.

With RHEL 7 supporting AArch64 after this announcement, I'd assume CentOS will follow suit.

RHEL 7 dropped i386. But of course also continues to support Power and s390 (IBM mainframe).

Supported platforms:

CentOS 5/6/7: https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-059f2f807ebb83e93f2...

RHEL 7.4: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

CentOS 5 and 6 are not supported based on the link you provided.

Enterprise-level support vs. use-at-your-own-risk science project.

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