They are still doing QA, it will be a week or two before GA
Before you rush to 7.0 after 6.5 - things you are going to have to learn because they change everything:
systemd replaces init.d
grub2 replaces grub
xfs is now default over ext4 filesystem
(many, many people dislike systemd, it is somewhat anti-linux in nature)No more easy editing/understanding grub.conf
No more easy to edit/understand /etc/init.d (systemctl instead)
No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)
Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in real world use for databases, etc.
Red Hat claims RHEL7 is 11-25% faster than RHEL6, I am not convinced at all, I think they are referencing a stock setup for 6 vs 7, but I don't know anyone that runs things stock without tuning. Wait for independent benchmarks.
CentOS 6.x will be supported until 2020
If you want a 3.x kernel for CentOS 6.x, try the ELrepo repository, they do builds for both mainline and longterm 3.x kernel releases. http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-lt
If you want newest GCC for CentOS 6.x try the CERN repo for devtoolset http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/devtoolset/
ps. there is currently no way to upgrade a 6.x install "in place" to 7.x, though Red Hat has migration tool and CentOS folks say they will look at doing the same - but like I said, don't be in a rush to early adopt 7.x
pps. RHEL7 notes are a way to explore what else is new: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...
True, the grub2 config is horrible.
No more easy to understand /etc/init.d
It's a bit more complicated, but not too bad:
Instead of "/etc/init.d/thing restart" you type "systemctl restart thing"
Instead of chkconfig --list, you type "systemctl list-dependencies"
Writing the equivalent script with systemd is much cleaner with less hacks, particularly for launching as different users and doing locking.
No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)
By default. It's fine once you get the hang of the new syntax:
journalctl --since=today --follow
Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in real world use for databases, etc.
Depends on the workload. Speed is only one part of it. For some benchmarks by phoronix see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315...
http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect/1305166-UT-FILESYSTE20/...
(and FreeBSD has declared they will never use it, which to be fair is easy for them to declare since they cannot use it because it requires posix) (correction: not posix, cgroups and udev)
I suspect so, because systemd needs it's logs for internal analysis?
Also, remote syslog, which journald doesn't support.
Oh, that's beautiful. And if you want to get s..t done, you can't even quickly search the manpage, because for religious reasons, GNU projects use that weird (and traditionally utterly verbose) info system. But hey, GNU is for GNU's Not Unix, so we shouldn't be too surprised ...
It's not like I didn't appreciate what the GNU project has done for the free software world, but it's so annoying that they seem to be focused more on religious matters than on writing good (well-documented, easy-to-configure, non-bloated) software.
I'm doing more and more server stuff with the BSDs, simply because the docs are so well-written and if I want to understand some part of the system, it doesn't feel like there are numerous layers of abstractions hiding away the interesting parts from me.
Why choose it as the default filesystem in an enterprise-oriented distro?
Does any of that really improve my day?
Nope. In fact most of it makes it worse and adds friction. More cogs turning in different directions.
Will keep our devops stuff on CentOS 6.5 for at least another 4 years...
What if someone needs one of the newer packages provided by RHEL7?
CentOS 6 had Upstart, right? Which is likely to become deprecated due to the fact that Ubuntu is also moving to systemd.
Sure, Red Hat are the ones pushing systemd, but some disruptive change away from Upstart was inevitable.
----
copy/paste if that goes down too:
hi,
At this point we have a set of images that we consider release grade, pending final testing, we will move to release these unless a major blocker is reported.
folks with bandwidth to spare are encouraged to help seed these images via torrents, here are the urls to hit:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...
- KB
Systemd has a few nice features that I (as a systems admin of thousands of servers) really like such as:
- simple "init script" like upstart, so magical or crappy shell scripts from vendors are a thing of the past. A standardized unit file
- Ulimit support natively as part of the format
- Limiting via memory/disk/cpu cgroups to contain buggy apps (hello mysql!)
- Process restarting so tools like supervisord, monit, runit, etc are no longer necessary
- It can _always_ stop an errant daemon as it uses control groups to do so, sysv init was sometimes buggy in this regard
- Private /tmp (via filesystem namespaces), limiting system calls a service can run, tcp wrappers, read only parts of the filesystem (like /etc) are all trivial to add to any legacy service such as bind or sendmail and a supported part of the systemd unit file definition.
RHEL/CentOS 7 also include some super nice things like the new abrtd for centrally reporting any application coredump/kernel issue, pacemaker/crm for high availability clusters, and just a lot newer linux userspace. (yay for du -hsc | sort -h | tail)As an _actual_ user who uses RHEL/Debian/etc on bare metal at scale, I really see nothing but awesome in RHEL7. It is just like I see awesome in Fedora 20 or in the latest Ubuntu/Debian. The Linux ecosystem has massively grown. Now we have a serious engineering company putting a lot of resources into supporting a new operating system. I'd love to see some of the technical reasons you have the opinion you do.
The nice thing to do for your customers is to make new technology optional, and provide alternatives for people who have 10+ year old infrastructure that they don't want to spend 2 years upgrading because it's now full of legacy systems. But RH not only shoves anything they want down your throat, half the time they're not transparent about the changes taking place, and you just have to hope nothing breaks your apps (kernel as an example, but userland package changes are similar).
> At this point we have a set of images that we consider release grade, pending final testing, we will move to release these unless a major blocker is reported.
Looking at: http://tecadmin.net/red-hat-enterprise-linux-7/# - will HAProxy come with centos 7?
NEVER rely on Google for documentation or GNU info as that's probably not installed on your server.
This sort of scenario is where *BSD win every time.