Ask HN: What can we use instead of Rockylinux for our compute nodes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can we use instead of Rockylinux for our compute nodes?

5 pointsreacharavindh8 comments

After the recent events in the last couple of days, with Red Hat essentially saying "We need/want to get paid for the curation and maintenance of the _open source_ packages that we build RHEL with", we have lost faith in the Red Hat ecosystem to use it as the base of our research HPC cluster at a small research group in a University.

Our cluster is currently being re-built with a new chunk of hardware and a big downtime for this upgrade is in a few months. We were set on going with Rockylinux as our base on about 64 baremetal servers doing HPC work. Now, it looks like an unsafe choice. Paying for RHEL subscriptions is not a real choice as their billing is based on Full time and part-time users with a fixed fee per such user - we deal with a rotating crowd of students and researchers from all over the world. Additionally, we are reliant on grant money that came for research to support the infra on the side. We cannot afford to channel grant money into RH licenses.

CentOS Stream seems to be a silly choice as we were running CentOS 8 all along until Redhat chose to burn it, and we dont want to trust RH again.

Fedora - easier to move to, but being a rolling distribution, it changes too fast for our HPC nodes..

Debian - ideal choice, but would mean need to change everything from our automation scripts, revalidate all our curated software packages to make sure they work on Debian, re-install stuff like SAS, and figure out how.. you get the point.

Folks who are at a similar trouble, which way are you going? Any suggestions for us?

If you want to keep most of the status quo, then take a deep breath, and install Oracle Linux. It's RHEL. But comes with the logo of Oracle. Funnily in this case Oracle's huge appetite for litigation could count even as a benefit, if RH/IBM wants to mess with them.

Note that RockyLinux and AlmaLinux already plan to pull patches directly from Oracle Linux if needed.

Its a good question and I don't know if I can answer fully as I am not in your situation.

But I would say Debian is the ideal choice. Yes its a lot of work to switch over, but I'd think they work would be too bad, and its a one time cost. Debian won't do what RedHat did, and you can be sure you'll be able to run it for years.

Those who are more experimental should also be considering OpenSUSE Leap. Not nearly as big as CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, but for their size it is a valiant attempt at open source enterprise Linux. Just be aware that the default filesystem is Btrfs, and most users will probably want to change this.

I'd like to have a close look at CloudLinux OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36493691

What's the difference between this and AlmaLinux? I was under the impression that CloudLinux had renamed to AlmaLinux and transferred ownership to the nonprofit, but apparently they are separate?

Edit: Reading into it, it seems that CloudLinux is similar to AlmaLinux, but has extra patches targeted towards shared hosting providers to support hosting management panel software. They will soon be releasing a free version that just has basic patching to make sure panel software works, but without the more elaborate proprietary offerings that commercial CloudLinux has.

What if Redhat doesn't commit patches to Centos steam on time, but backports their internal RHEL branches? What if Oracle doesn't backport on time? In that case, Almalinux has to fix their own branch with their patches, thereby diverging from 1 to 1 RHEL. This diverged AlmaLinux is CloudLinux. No more 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL. So, Cloudlinux leads its own life, with its own patches for any CVEs, etc.

AlmaLinux has not diverged.

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