[Openembedded-architecture] Yocto support for Centos-7 (RHEL-7): drop in early 2020?

[Diego Santa Cruz]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openembedded-architecture-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> <openembedded-architecture-bounces at lists.openembedded.org> On Behalf Of
> Khem Raj
> Sent: 10 December 2019 20:35
> To: Randy MacLeod <randy.macleod at windriver.com>
> Cc: openembedded-architecture <openembedded-
> architecture at lists.openembedded.org>
> Subject: Re: [Openembedded-architecture] Yocto support for Centos-7 (RHEL-7):
> drop in early 2020?
> 
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 9:23 AM Randy MacLeod
> <randy.macleod at windriver.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > In the YP technical meeting today, Richard suggested that we stop
> > support for CentOS-7. Is there any objection to doing so before
> > 3.1-M2?
> >
> > CentOS-7 is just too old and there is significant work to support it.
> 
> I am in support of it, but then I also fear that many corporate policies might still
> be using it until 2024 when security updates end so perhaps would like to hear
> centos7 users here. if no one speaks up then we can safely retire it before 3.1
> 

While I see what the motivation to remove CentOS-7 is, dropping it will probably create issues for people. CentOS 8 was released not so long ago. In our case we have older products (among which Yocto based ones) which do not necessarily work on CentOS 8. CentOS 8 is relatively recent, so we have not had time to test how old products work on it.

Isn't it possible to require things like devtoolset-8 (gcc 8.3, binutils-2.30) on CentOS 7 to keep it going?

In our case we are using devtoolset-8 with Yocto thud on CentOS 7 with success, as some layers require a recent host gcc to build.

> > Richard said that many if not most of the package upgrades that he
> > deals with fail for CentOS-7 and he has to either fix them himself or
> > get the person who submitted the work to do so. Newer distributions
> > are not nearly so problematic.
> >
> > While the CentOS-7 distro is still a supported by it's provider, the
> > toolchain is very old:
> >   - gcc-4.8
> >   - glibc-2.17
> >   - binutils-2.27
> >
> > One could add a newer toolchain to the buildtools tarball to address
> > some of the CentOS-7 support problems. So far, we have only use the
> > host's toolchain and it seems best to continue to do so.
> >
> > Release and support dates for CentOS-6,7,8 are here:
> >    https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product
> > Note that 'Full Updates' or new hardware support for
> > CentOS-7 stops in Q3 2020.
> >
> > --
> > # Randy MacLeod
> > # Wind River Linux
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> > Openembedded-architecture at lists.openembedded.org
> > http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-architectu
> > re
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--
Diego Santa Cruz, PhD
Technology Architect
spinetix.com