Red Hat Archive

With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol. While we recognize the energy behind some distributions and Fedora spins moving towards a similar future, this decision is limited to RHEL 10—we recognize other Linux distributions have different needs and decision structures, and additionally we are not aware of plans for similar efforts in Fedora, nor are we involved in similar efforts besides sharing our knowledge. A sensible move, now that X.org is no longer really maintained and considered legacy software by everyone who has the skillset and knowledge to actually maintain it in the first place. I know a number of people are very upset about the move to Wayland, but with nobody left willing to work on X.org because it’s effectively unmaintainable, there’s really no other way to go. If you really want X.org to continue – perhaps you should channel the energy spent on writing angry online comments towards contributing to X.org. However, with even the most knowledgeable and capable X.org developers no longer wanting to have anything to do with X.org, you’re going to be in for a rough ride.

Red Hat’s announcement last week caused quite a bit of a stir, so today, Red Hat published a blog post to defend itself. We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL. When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it. I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. The details — including open source licenses and rights — matter, and these are things Red Hat has helped to not only form but also preserve and evolve.  I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous. In the strictest sense, Red Hat has a point in that as long as the company abides by the various licenses covering the code they use, alter, and redistribute, there’s really nothing anyone else can really demand from them. Abiding by the licensing terms of open source code is the bedrock and foundation upon which the entire open source ecosystem is built, and suddenly demanding people do more is actually not fair – if you want to demand more from the downstream users of your code than, for instance, the GPL demands, then you should choose a different, stricter license. That being said, the open source community is also, as the term implies, a community, and taking something you have been providing for decades away from a community merely for financial gain – which is ultimately what their reasoning comes down to – is never going to go down well. And since you’re building upon and are part of that same community, you’re biting the very hand that feeds you. I understand Red Hat’s position, and as long as they abide by the licensing terms in question, I’m not going to be mad about it. However, it’s still shitty, and it still negatively affects a ton of people.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 is now officially available to Red Hat customers as stable, building off the RHEL9 beta available since the end of last year. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 ships with a wealth of updated software components and derived from CentOS Stream. On the versioning front, RHEL9 has GCC 11 as the default system compiler, Python 3.9, RPM 4.16, PHP 8.0, updated LLVM / Rust / Go compilers, a plethora of optimizations, OpenSSL 3, Ruby 3.0, and much more to enjoy with this major release for enterprise Linux users. Linux 5.14 is the kernel in use by RHEL 9.0 albeit with various kernel back-ports. There will be several community alternatives based on RHEL 9.0 soon enough, too, so if you want to run something RHEL like without all the corporate support, there’s enough options, too.

Rocky Linux, a fork of CentOS and a replacement set up by one of the founders of the original CentOS project, has unveiled its first final release. Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. Since this is the first Release of Rocky Linux, the release notes below reflect only changes in upstream functionality between point releases. CentOS needed a replacement since the project shifted focus towards CentOS Stream.

Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer. NVFS aims to be a speedy file-system for persistent memory like Intel Optane DCPMM. NVFS is geared for use on DAX-based (direct access) devices and maps the entire device into a linear address space that bypasses the Linux kernel’s block layer and buffer cache. I understood some of those words.

The “stream” of development in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem has been Fedora > RHEL > CentOS, but Red Hat is changing things up: The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a “rolling preview” of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases.

Only fourteen short years ago:

What a time to be alive.

Fedora version 21 has been launched. The Fedora project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has taken a new approach with the new version of the Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora 21 has been split into three separate product offerings: Workstation, Cloud and Server. Each product shares a common base, allowing for software compatibility between the three branches. According to the release announcement, Fedora 21 ships with a number of new administration tools, a new graphical package manager and experimental support for running the GNOME desktop on a Wayland display server. More detailed information on Fedora's latest release can be found in the project's release notes.

CentOS 6 can be upgraded to 7, but that functionality is still being tested.

Well, that's certainly a different tune from Red Hat. Welcome though!

The Fedora developers have decided that Fedora 16 will not use Btrfs by default. The announcement was made by Josef Bacik, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. Instead the switch to Btrfs filesystem has now been postponed to Fedora 17.

"We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.0 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. CentOS-6.0 is based on the upstream release EL 6.0 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. There are some important changes to this release compared with the previous versions of CentOS and we highly recommend reading this announcement along with the Release Notes."

"San Francisco–Red Hat is the strongest Linux company in the world when it comes to servers, but it has almost no presence on the desktop. That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments-based virtual desktop infrastructure."

"Red Hat is out today last week with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6. After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn't a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren't in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update. Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users. Among the updates that I find interesting from a server perspective is an update to BIND 9.7 for DNS, which has improved DNSSEC capabilities. As DNSSEC is now enabled in the root zone of the Internet, the time for all DNS servers globally to be DNSSEC enabled is here. The other interesting thing to note is that EXT4 finally is fully supported for RHEL 5.x with the 5.6 update."