[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Mark Hahn wrote:

> > >>   I am sure others will take issue with this, but I would strongly 
> > >>advise against using a rolling beta OS (FC-x) as the basis for a 
> > >>production cycle machine.  If it is a purely experimental cluster, go 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > calling a non-test FC release "beta" is just plain petty;
> > > all software is beta by that definition.
> > 
> > Not at all.  This is a direct quote from http://fedora.redhat.com
> > 
> > "The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open 
> > source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may 
> > eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported 
> > product of Red Hat, Inc."
> > 
> > It is by Redhat's definition, a rolling beta (proving ground).
> 
> perhaps those words have a different meaning for you.  FC releases
> are real releases, fully usable in a production environment.
> the fact that they are a staging ground does not mean that they
> are not production-worthy, or have not been tested.  it really 
> only means that FC is on a shorter release cycle, and might contain
> the new puce-and-teal color scheme, which turns out to be a bad idea.
> 
> beta is short for beta-test, and necessarily means that the testing
> and resulting behavior has not reached a level which permits release.
> of course, you may distrust any software's release criteria.

Ya, I'd tend to agree with Mark here -- by too broad a definition linux
itself is one big rolling beta release (a point of view M$ would
cheerfully espouse to its customers and probably does).

Besides, FC is as stable and usable as RH ever was (he says typing at
his FC2 laptop while working in his various FC2 and FC3 workstations and
with his FC2-based cluster).  RHEL can also be spelled "stagnant" --
having a really long release/support cycle (however valuable it is to
certain customers) also means that new features take a long time to
appear.

It's easy enough to stabilize the FC cycle to a bit less than the
frenetic pace the distro itself uses -- just "issue" (use in production)
every other release in your environment.  For example we're using FC2 in
production now, although most of our high end linux humans are running
at least some FC3 systems (I am, for example).  When FC4 come out, we'll
package it up for production, skipping FC3 altogether.

    rgb

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-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu