Russ Herrold wrote: >It may turn out that we (ClefOS) need to fork and offer two >variants
I guess I'd call them "streams" rather than "forks." For what it's worth, Red Hat seems to offer at least 3 major streams now: Fedora (their "community" release), RHEL Structure A, and RHEL. The RHEL Structure A/RHEL pair of streams is a unique offering for the s390x architecture branch, at least for now. (Is it a one-time aberration or the start of something new? I have no idea, so ask Red Hat, I guess.) In RHEL 7.5, Red Hat decided to offer kernel 3.10 (only) for all POWER processors prior to POWER9, and (only) kernel 4.14 for POWER9. For X86-64 it's only 3.10, and for ARM64 it's only 4.14. There are certain newer capabilities that RHEL 7.5 doesn't support on s390x that RHEL 7.5 Structure A does. Red Hat's release notes explain all that. But it's possible to mix RHEL and RHEL Structure A instances on the same machine and in a Red Hat supported way. (And, for that matter, other supported RHEL releases.) It looks like the minimum RHEL 7.5/RHEL 7.5 Structure A machine model requirement hasn't changed since RHEL 7.4, so it's z196/z114 processors or higher, which includes all LinuxONE machines. I don't have a strong view on the "right" approach for Linux release streams. It really depends on end users and what they prefer, and they might choose particular Linux distributors based on their different release/service stream approaches. There are some important principles, though. I'd say that maintaining security currency is quite important, as a notable example. But that'll likely mean not waiting too long to exploit new system features since many of those new features are often security-related. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE, Multi-Geography E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
