Kernel page-table isolation merged

Posted Dec 31, 2017 14:17 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: Kernel page-table isolation merged by jhoblitt
Parent article: Kernel page-table isolation merged

RHEL == Red Hat Enterprise Linux throughout. [I know Red Hat folk don't like the abbreviation but I'm lazy :) ]

If running RHEL/CentOS 6 - move your machines and code to version 7 quickly? There's no very good reason not to run 7 given that 6 is coming to the end of its supported life [November 2020 is less than two years away now] and 6.8 was likely the last major release.

Oh, and if you're not running RHEL 6.8 move to it now for your RHEL machines because there is a relatively supported upgrade script to take 6 machines forward to 7 [This no longer works well for CentOS machines because of version skew between 6 and 7 and the CentOS folk are looking for a new maintainer - but RHEL will presumably pay someone to hand fix it]

And 2.6.32 is well beyond support, realistically, for any but the very worst case: RHEL 7 has a 3.* kernel and I'd expect RHEL 8 betas any day now with a 4.* kernel (probably 4.4). I can't see anyone willingly supporting three supported versions of RHEL concurrently so 6 users are being encouraged to move to 7 now: there's no conceivable upgrade path to skip from 6 to 8 over 15 years worth of development.

Kernel page-table isolation merged

Posted Dec 31, 2017 16:04 UTC (Sun) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

There are plenty of users still on RHEL 6. RHEL 6.9 was released last March, and I would be surprised if it's the last update.

The last RHEL 5 release was 5.11, and in fact 2020 will be when the last security updates come for RHEL 5, not 6.

Kernel page-table isolation merged

Posted Dec 31, 2017 19:41 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Only if you're paying for extended lifecycle support - 5 was extended to 30/11/2020 as was 6 but only for RHEL. CentOS stopped supporting 5 this year, CentOS 6 will be 30/11/2020

Kernel page-table isolation merged

Posted Jan 2, 2018 13:46 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> there's no conceivable upgrade path to skip from 6 to 8 over 15 years worth of development.

As has been pointed out here before, I believe ... how many systems are installed and never upgraded? If you have no plans to upgrade the system ever, why start now?

Although, in that case, it would probably make sense to start migrating whatever apps you have that matter, across to a new system.

Cheers,
Wol