[Ocfs2-users] OCFS2 support for RHEL 6.4

[David Johle]

"All practical purposes" except the extremely practical purpose of 
having shared filesystems in a cluster.

I can see that RedHat may have interest in refusing to allow OCFS2 on 
RHEL because it conflicts with their own GFS2 product offering.  And 
I can see that Oracle may have interest in refusing to allow OCFS2 on 
RHEL because that conflicts with their own OL6 product offering.

Sure, the OL6 may be "pay less for better support" but when a shop 
has a large quantity of RHEL6 systems already, and wants to use just 
a few of them with OCFS2, it complicates things if those boxen have 
to run the slightly different OL6 instead (more support contracts to 
manage, different patch/upgrade lifecycles to follow, etc.).

So tell me Herbert, is it actually a technical limitation, or was the 
decision to not support RHEL6 politically motivated?
(Politically meaning a corporate and/or financial conflict of interest)

As it stands, I have a handful of systems that are "stuck" on RHEL5 + 
OCFS2 1.4.x for the time being because I would have to replace them 
with OL6 instead of RHEL6 if I want to upgrade either one of the OS 
or the OCFS2 version.  All these years (since the early OCFS2 1.2.x 
on RHEL4) we had been strung along with the almost instant RHEL RPM 
releases.  Then came mainline kernel acceptance of OCFS2, and we were 
even happier and more confident that it was okay to rely on this 
filesystem for years to come.

I was kinda bummed when the no RHEL6 thing came about, and really 
hate to think it's due to upper management style decision making, as 
that is very much against a lot of the principles behind Linux & Open 
Source in general.



At 05:19 PM 4/22/2014, ocfs2-users-request at oss.oracle.com wrote:
>Message: 3
>Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:12:52 -0700
>From: Herbert van den Bergh <herbert.van.den.bergh at oracle.com>
>Subject: Re: [Ocfs2-users] OCFS2 support for RHEL 6.4
>To: "Pratt, Lisa M" <Lisa.M.Pratt at boeing.com>,
>         "ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com" <ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com>
>Message-ID: <5356E964.4060603 at oracle.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>Supported Operating Systems     Oracle Linux, RHEL (OCFS 1.4.8 only)
>
>
>And since 1.4.8 isn't supported on RHEL6, that implies OCFS2 isn't
>supported on RHEL6.  It is on OL6, which is identical to RHEL6 for all
>practical purposes, except that you have to be willing to pay less for
>better support ;-)
>
>Thanks,
>Herbert.