Beyond Scientific Linux

[rclark]

Well, all I know is I installed SL on three machines this year and they have been running flawlessly. My 'users' have been happlily writing and running fortran applications via VNC sessions and love it. One of the boxes in my new 'backup' to my main server Fedora 5 server (won't load it again BTW on my servers as the 6 month update period is way to short ... even though it is still running flawlessly too). Not a hiccup. Just runs like it should. I do believe I just updated the SL boxes to 6.3 too....

[edited] Not Fedora 15 ... Fedora Core 5. Opps

[AndrewSerk]

For those that are getting clinched up by the thought of gnome3/systemd in Scientific Linux 7 next year, don't fret too much, Scientific Linux version 6x will be supported till at least the year 2020!

[Dan]

That's a relief! Thanks. <....>

[DBelton]

And just how many people do you think will still be using SL6 in the year 2020?

Possibly a few.. With all the new things that have been coming out, I have been really tempted in pulling out my Windows version 1 diskettes

[AndrewSerk]

Originally Posted by DBelton

And just how many people do you think will still be using SL6 in the year 2020?

Using version 5 as a refrence, I would say there will be many still using sl6 in 2020. I bet I will be one of them.

IMMO, most sysadmins don't want to replace/rebuild/reinstall a OS/VM that is working perfectly just because a newer version has come out. This old saying comes to mind "Don't try to fix what is not broken".

Originally Posted by Dan

That's a relief! Thanks. <....>

My Pleasure

[lsatenstein]

When the Operating system suddenly has to live with UEFI, and each Kernel module or driver has to be certified, a new upgraded software version will be required. Hardware (disks in particular0 do not usually last 8 years).

In 8 years we could see hardware moving from 64 bit to something larger, say 96 or 128bit systems. The new applications would be unable to run on SL 6.x

Oh well. take it one day at a time.

[hadrons123]

Originally Posted by lsatenstein

When the Operating system suddenly has to live with UEFI, and each Kernel module or driver has to be certified, a new upgraded software version will be required. Hardware (disks in particular0 do not usually last 8 years).

In 8 years we could see hardware moving from 64 bit to something larger, say 96 or 128bit systems. The new applications would be unable to run on SL 6.x

Oh well. take it one day at a time.

Actually there is no reason to move to 128 bit. 64 shall be mainstream.
I expect ARM to take more center stage obliterating x86, x86-64 arch, pretty much everywhere.

[jpollard]

I don't know... it depends on how you define "128bit systems".

There already has been one that had instructions of up to about 4k in length, with instructions for data manipulations up to 32k...

Just check the old VAX instructions... Or the Cray with its vector instructions.

Yes, the bus on the VAX was set to 32 bits (less depending on version)... but that doesn't mean that was the data limit. There was even one study that suggested it should have up to 5 data busses for maximum throughput on the VAX. The old crays already had 4 data busses from memory (1.2GB each) just to keep up. (for fun, look up the VAX enque/deque instructions... also the poly instruction for the longest)

There already are modern needs for 128 bits... IPv6 uses those as a unit. And some GPUs also use a very wide data sets.

I expect some of the GPU operations to merge into the CPU... and that just might require a 128 bit CPU for optimum use.

[rclark]

IMMO, most sysadmins don't want to replace/rebuild/reinstall a OS/VM that is working perfectly just because a newer version has come out. This old saying comes to mind "Don't try to fix what is not broken".

Exactly my reasoning. When I bring a new system on line, it will get the latest stable release.... But what I have running will stay unless there comes a reason to move on... One of the things I really like about Linux is maintenance is almost nil. Even though my Fedora 5 box hasn't been 'updated' since 2006, it just serves files, cross compiles, serves printers as usual. Has been and is a good stable back-end data server.