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

[Diego Santa Cruz]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Khem Raj <raj.khem at gmail.com>
> Sent: 12 December 2019 20:38
> To: Diego Santa Cruz <Diego.SantaCruz at spinetix.com>
> Cc: Randy MacLeod <randy.macleod at windriver.com>; 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 11:14 PM Diego Santa Cruz
> <Diego.SantaCruz at spinetix.com> wrote:
> >
> > > -----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.
> >
> 
> it will start with 3.1 which means that this impacts when user is
> upgrading beyong 3.1, so there still is time to plan upgrade of build
> infra if one plans to.
> 
> > Isn't it possible to require things like devtoolset-8 (gcc 8.3, binutils-2.30) on
> CentOS 7 to keep it going?
> >
> 
> It certainly is, and perhaps a good writeup enabling scl to use
> updated toolchain might be a good contribution to yocto projects "How
> do I" page [1]
> however, in many cases IT folks dont let users install packages as
> they wish, so it still would require some process change on top of
> prerequisites that
> yocto already asks for.
> 

The setup is not difficult, I could manage to write something up in Feb., before that it will be difficult to set time aside.

But if the system's glibc on CentOS 7 causes problems then that's another story, as to the best of my knowledge there is no scl (nor any equivalent concept) for that.

> > 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.
> >
> it certainly means extra work for setup etc and scl is interactive, so
> perhaps if its described clearly how one can use it that might help
> end users.

Well, scl is not necessary interactive, although it is generally presented like that. But in any case it remains easier than updating existing systems to CentOS 8 ;-)

> 
> [1] https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/How_do_I

--
Diego Santa Cruz, PhD
Technology Architect
spinetix.com