What decisions have been made, and what subsequent experience can institutions share concerning the Red Hat discontinuation of CentOS Linux 8 as a rebuild of RHEL 8? Is there one dominant direction? Or a clear advantage to one choice over another?
It really depends on if you need minor version kernel stability for kmods?
CERN and Fermilab are recommending Stream:
OpenHPC have switched to targeting Rocky:
Our University has a RHEL site license, so my department is currently planning on CentOS7 → RHEL9, skipping 8 altogether.
Hey Torey,
For the OpenHPC project, we’ve chosen to use Rocky (https://rockylinux.org/) as our RHEL clone. We build with RHEL and test with Rocky. At ISC, PEARC and SC last year during our BoF sessions, we polled our attendees and Rocky came out on top. Also, we already use warewulf as one of our provisioners and use Singularity/Apptainer as one of our supported container solutions, so the choice just makes sense.
Now, that being said, multiple OpenHPC sites have reported success using OpenHPC (built with RHEL and tested on Rocky) with Oracle linux as well as Alma Linux. Truth be told, any of the RHEL clones should work (mostly) the same and be binary compatible.
CentOS stream can also be used but will require more frequent sysadmin effort but it’s not too bad, especially if you make use of automated (CI/CD) based methods to build your supported software stacks. On my personal dev box for OpenHPC, I do use CentOS stream.
Happy to hop on a call and discuss sometime.
Best,
Chris