[CentOS-devel] 32 bit Centos 7

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 11:15 AM, Scott Dowdle <dowdle at montanalinux.org> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> There's also a very large commercial 32bit user base that is being
>> abandoned by the upstream. I know the "Centos marks" can't be used
>> in commercial markets, but this is a topic that could use some
>> thought.
>>
>> I'm talking on the order of hundreds of thousands of platforms that
>> require newer os features, but logistics fail to allow the hardware
>> to be updated. I'm not talking theoretical here, I'm talking of a
>> legitimate case where the upstream is abandoning its existing
>> customer base and trying to force hardware upgrade schedules. Is it
>> past time everything was 64bit? Sure. Does that mean I can just wave
>> a magic wand and make it happen on their schedule? Absolutely not.
>
> Upstream has also "abandoned" a significant number of hardware RAID cards and network cards in EL7.  I have a few HP Proliant 64-bit servers that are about 6 or 7 years old... and the RAID card isn't detected in 7 where it was in 6.  I've heard a few other people mention the same thing with regards to their NICs.

What's the model? If you say "Promise", I don't blame upstream. Those
things were *horrible*. And a lot of RAID cards frankly weren't, they
offloaded a stack of the processing to the main CPU, with the result
of fragile integration and poor performance. Real RAID cards became
more and more difficult to find on hardware at about that time, cheapo
onboard controllers were replacing RAID cards. And oh, lord, those
MegaRAID chipsets weren't much better than Promise. I always had good
success with 3Ware: they just worked, and they cooperated with Linux
in getting the drivers working well.

> So besides the hundreds of thousands of existing systems running 32-bit only, there are also quite a few other systems that are incompatible with EL7 because of other hardware.
>
> Answer, continue to use 6 for the years it has left.
>
> If EL6 died on EL7 release day, then yes there would be an "abandonment"... but since 6 still has a few years left on it, not so much.

Yeah. And the increasing RAM and CPU burden of hte base OS also
becomes more burdensome on older hardware. Moore's law continues to
encourage developers to trade optimization and lean design in for
features, wanted or not. (Gnome 3 and NetworkManager: Blech!)