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

Randy MacLeod randy.macleod at windriver.com
Thu Dec 12 23:53:01 UTC 2019


On 12/10/19 2:34 PM, Khem Raj wrote:
> 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


I confirmed that some of our customers still use RHEL-7 for
many of their build machines. Some have only recently gone through the pain
of upgrading from RHEL-6. Such an upgrade is relatively simple for individual
developers but for large organizations it can take many if not 10s of person-years
of work. It would therefore be difficult, costly, and painful for them to migrate
again so soon. As Khem mentioned in another thread, supporting using SCL:
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Developer_Guide/scl-utils.html
may not be viable for such organizations either.


At some point, be it in 2020 or 2021, such organizations will have to either
update their OSes, use containers/VMs, or arrange for custom support for older distros
but many users would prefer for that day be delayed until after oe-core-3.2 to
coincide with the end of support for new hardware installs.

../Randy

>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Openembedded-architecture mailing list
>> Openembedded-architecture at lists.openembedded.org
>> http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-architecture


-- 
# Randy MacLeod
# Wind River Linux



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