State of the Nation – Linux distributions

thanks for joining this is uh September Munch and learn and um today I have with me Craig and uh before I hand it over to Craig I just like to go through a few house items about our HP developer Community program my name is DDA and I'm the technical lead for for that program together with me Frederick is in the call as well we um we will monitor the the chat and the Q a we also have Karen uh helping Craig with answering questions please make sure you ask questions in the Q a and you can have discussions in the chat it's easier for us to keep track of of the questions so the HP developer Community as as you might know we deliver a number of things two of the things are basically technology talks we have two different programs that we run on a monthly basis one is called Manchester and that's part of the theory here and it's really around the salt leadership a little bit vendor and product agnostic we try to be um uh talk about Trends and and interesting topics that we should all be aware of that's the case of today's discussion for October I don't have a a series a talk yet uh concretely uh I can I can announce so you're gonna have to uh wait a little bit but in any case everything will be announced on our mansion on page together with all the Play From the Past uh session we started this program in early 21 so we have a quite a collection of replays that can you can watch we started early 22 another program called the meetups in order to go into a little more details about a particular product um we started this with uh also with Partners we had red ads coming up for the first session on guacus if we were there already we have two sessions like already in the in the planned for October and November and one is by a partner called netoper and they're going to talk about uh basically the devops alert and Tool sprawl and um it should be very interesting you can register for this we have the links already available on the Meetup page and I think my colleagues in the in the in the room in the Q a will also uh post the links there so you can register and we have another session uh in November late November um after Thanksgiving where we'll have read that coming back and talking about container spots and uh their approach to container imports called podman so that's also going to be a very interesting session and I encourage you to join that's for the technology talk we also have additional things that we deliver in the as part of the developer Community one thing that you should be aware of is this thing we call the workshops on demand you can go and check the the catalog of those workshops that we have today more than 30 are available they are available over the internet free of charge we use jupy download books to deliver the this training content and this is really about to learn um in most cases 101 type of trainings on different technology open source technology uh relative to developers and data scientists so take a look if you have IDs of 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and help us add more content to the to the site if you also want to deliver a Meetup reach out to me and we can schedule that and if you think we're missing something in a workshop catalog then if you're willing to help we can explain what we have for the framework and you can plug in some additional workshops pretty easily so again reach out to us so that's all our links and our touch points whether we have the external slack the internal slack on the HP internal slack that you can join we have the monthly newsletter you can subscribe to this QR code you can scan you'll get all the links as well the Twitter we have a Yammer group for for partners and this is our catalog of workshops on demand so feel free to reach out to us on any of the of those touch points and we'll be happy to work with you now this is uh the interesting piece that is about to start so I'm going to hand it off to Craig for the real content of the session thank you very much thank you DDF for the for the intro and for hosting this is this is a lot of fun we've got plenty of people here so for those of you who don't know me my name is Craig lampparter I'm a Linux system software engineer I've been with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for just over 30 years and in that capacity I think I've worked with Linux and open source software one way or another almost the entire time in fact I think my first Linux distribution that I installed was via floppy disks maybe slackware or egg drazzle I I don't know it's I've been involved with Linux for a long time let's just put it that way we're going to talk about that today Linux distributions maybe some road maps uh which distributions are popular and why what distributions we support and why this is going to have kind of a server perspective behind it because we're a server company not necessarily desktop you know it's probably a whole different conversation right in there right there so let's get into it Linux distribution so maybe we can just say what a Linux distribution is first so Linux distribution is really just an operating system and at its Center there's the Linux kernel that's developed by Linus tour Valves and the Linux kernel really does nothing more than manage Hardware it's software that manages Hardware um so what's the difference between all these Linux distributions the value is the same kernel well it's really the the number and type of applications that run under that kernel that kind of Define a Linux distribution the packaging format maybe it's RPMs maybe it's Debs they usually have unique installation processes um and you know maybe one Linux distribution is going to use Firefox by default another one's going to use Chrome by default or I mean in the server context maybe Apache by default or nginx by default so there's thousands and thousands of these application software packages and so the combinations and permutations are almost infinite and that's why we see so many different Linux distributions now the slide I'm showing is from distroatch.com this isn't like a scientific poll it's not really a popularity contest the way they measure this is just a click-through rate for news articles related to Linux distributions and usually new and more interesting Linux distributions rise to the top and then they fall from grace as they get older people get bored with it so there's just so much change in the industry right now when it comes to Linux distributions like for example I should have you can I'll have to turn your head sideways we've got mx limits Linux at the top mint Endeavor those are real popular right now because they're changing fast and kind of new and then we see the typical players like Debian and Ubuntu Fedora KDE those are at the top and you know the Enterprise ones are on here too we see red hat to Sousa and we even see open BSD down here number 89 which isn't even a Linux distribution so I'm not even sure why that one's there so this is distroatch.com don't take this this rating system as an industry you know what's in use by the industry a lot of these are desktop oriented right when we're kind of talking about servers so you know it definitely has an interesting interesting spin here so this is distro watcher.com and they are currently tracking 272 Linux distributions a unique operating systems um so you know as a hardware vendor we have some choices to make when it comes to supporting Linux distributions we could support all of them and not very well probably poorly probably barely at all you know when it comes to drivers and firmware updates managing Hardware getting you know making sure every single Linux distribution runs best on hpe proliant servers um or maybe we could just support one let's just pick one I don't know what's your favorite Linux distribution well even if we picked one it would even if it was the the best one today it probably wouldn't be you know in a few months from now so we have to keep that in mind so the hpes process and supporting or decision-making process is Deport support a few Linux distributions to various degrees to make sure that they really run best on hpe servers uh we have a lot of inputs for those that decision-making process ultimately it's up to our customers I mean I have a favorite Linux distribution personally but I'm not gonna I'll probably Give It Away by the end of this thing but I'll deny it in public um you know and whatever my favorite Linux distribution is doesn't matter because it's probably not right for you I'm a unique customer right um I have a different background than a lot of a lot of our customers so they're going to choose something else for different reasons so ultimately listen to our customers to decide which Linux distribution is best or what we're really going to focus on to make sure it runs best on hpe hardware and a lot of some Linux distributions are Community Driven that means just just a bunch of people working on it no real organization other Linux distributions the Enterprise E ones uh there's usually a company or something behind it where we can have a contractual agreements when it comes to support and certification so we have a kind of a combination of those ultimately our contribution our contributions back from an hpe perspective or to deliver drivers firmware and agent software we try and push our patches Upstream into the Linux kernel itself into Linus tour of Alex kernel the creator of Linux that way when uh these Linux distributions are created they get all of our drivers and changes automatically so in a sense we're kind of enabling all Linux distributions or at least any lens distribution uses a modern Linux kernel um and of course we have to adapt to fast changes you know it's our goal basically in the Linux enablement lab where I work to make Linux on proliant the best combination in the industry so this is some of our process to make that happen all right so here's a list of Linux distributions that we are generally interested in as a hardware provider um so I call this the dartboard and we support each one of these Linux distributions um to various levels so we've got Susa and red hat these are the big Enterprise ones there's big commercial companies Behind These there's definitely a good server oriented distributions long life stable ABI that kind of thing and then in certified area we've got Ubuntu and Oracle these are Linux distributions where there's a company behind them we can have some contracts with them there's some expectation of support and then in with down here in the bottom this is this is the wild west of Linux distributions these are the community supported Linux distress there's not really or necessarily a company promoting these or supporting these and that's open Sousa Fedora Debian we've got rocky Linux Alma Linux and Centos which we'll talk a little more about here and these are in no order of technical Merit I mean you could say arguably Fedora is more advanced than I don't know oracle Linux or or Alma because that's it's a Community Driven one and that's where the software is is put together initially when it's first written kind of tested um it may not be very stable but it's at least it's the newest software and then as that software kind of ferments or percolates down it's distilled into uh you know stable more stable farms and that's where we see these Enterprise Linux distributions which is what we generally support to our full extent which is Susa and red hat so these are supported certified and tested that Susa and red hat at the top and DD here I don't know if your mic is on can you see my mouse cursor I wasn't sure if I could use that as a pointer or not I don't see your mouse can I see my mouse pointer oh yes yeah yeah we see your little hands yes you see my little hand okay yeah I don't know I can't make that bigger but I usually have a laser pointer right when we're presenting in in person um so yeah I always depend on that okay you can see my little hand moving on so we're talking about supported certified intense distribution so that's Susan Red Hat this is where we provide drivers firmware update uh uh software management this works with one view this works with our entire hpe support stack and the reason we we like these is because when customers want them and two they really have really long life spans and very stable kernel abis and application apis application binary interfaces so when we make a driver of one of these it lasts throughout the life cycle of a complete version of red hat or Sousa um to a lesser extent uh that's what the Ubuntu and Oracle down here where we certify and test these this is where we say hey here's a here's a dl380 Ubuntu or canonical I should say certify that so a customer can call and say you know if I want support for Ubuntu on my Proline I can buy it because hpe and canonical work together to certify that uh what's interesting about Ubuntu is uh payment isn't obligatory right you can install Ubuntu all day long all you want the real version then if you want support down the road you can buy it you can't that can't be said about red hat and Seuss in the supported certified and tested ones um they have a big budget right um you know sometimes we'll we'll fly out to Nuremberg to work on Susa right or you'll see the Susa guys in in Houston and so we really work on that tight integration with Susan red hat so Ubuntu and Oracle uh we work with them but not to the extent we work with Susan red hat but it's great stuff and a lot of people say well you know you don't provide drivers for Ubuntu and a lot of times we don't have to because Ubuntu tracks the newer kernels it's so it has the newer technology it's not it's not kind of a that Legacy stability uh with Ubuntu so we don't necessarily have to provide drivers for Ubuntu in that regard down here at the bottom We've Got What I Call tested and this is where we're just doing smoke tests um we could like open through Surfer door for example I miss like I said it's the Wild West it's where software is being incubated and being put into Linux distributions and eventually Fedora will turn into Centos stream which will eventually turn into red hat for example you know once it's uh distilled and tested and stable um so we could put together drivers and a whole support plan around Fedora for example but you know Fedora or Susa Tumbleweed you know even if we got it working this week it might break next week because that's how fast the development is happening on some of these Community Driven Linux distributions again these are in no order of technical Merit like I said the community stuff usually has the latest and greatest of everything whereas the enterprisey stuff has older versions of software but typically more stable so that's that's kind of a spectrum you can't really have it both ways so supported certified and tested and this is the landscape that hpe sees for Linux distributions right now and it's always changing all right so we can talk about Susa a little bit uh Seuss is an Enterprise Linux distribution that we support to a full extent like red hat um and then like uh canonical Ubuntu Fedora all the others um these have really long life cycles like I said 13 years for a Linux distribution that's a long time I mean a lot of us don't have cars that are 13 years old right so they're still supporting Celeste 15 sp5 15 years out or 13 years out and it could be even longer than that based on some of the stuff we're going to talk about here a little bit as to how long these are supported asusa is widely popular in uh emea Europe specifically it has kind of has an sap emphasis it doesn't mean you can't run sap on other Linux distributions but that seems to kind of be their Niche I don't want to pigeonhole them it's a great general purpose Linux distribution but that's just to give you some characteristics or at least the customer feedback that we're getting on Susu so that's Susa and we're at Susa Enterprise Linux 15 or sp5 so they don't have Point releases they don't have 15.1 1.2.3 they'll have service packs sp3 sp4 and we're currently at sp5 all right and we do work really closely with these we meet with them every week right now I'm talking about you know what drivers do we need to get in what new hardware do we have coming out with our release cycle so we Susa always works on day one and hpe proliant servers all right the next Enterprise Linux distribution that we support fully uh from a Hewlett-Packard expect perspective is Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux uh this has been around since the 90s I mean I was installing red hat on CD-ROM I think in the 90s that's back when it was a more of a community-based Linux distribution but it grew up like a lot of them do and became a big commercial entity with long support Cycles stable abis something you could really run in the Enterprise and Trust so so red Hat's been there for a long time and and a lot of people ask me what's going to be the best Linux distribution tomorrow or and then in the next few years and I always go back and I look at Red Hat uh so what what were the kids installing on their computers or in college you know what what Linux was being installed back in the 90s or at the turn of the century it was largely red hat so you know back then if people ask me what's going to be the next big commercial Linux distribution I'm gonna have to say well it's whatever the kids are using in University or in their Laboratories um because they're going to grow up and get jobs and their I.T director is going to

ask them hey what Linux distribution should we use and they're just going to say what they know which is what they were installing and using in the laboratory environment and I think that's really where a red hat came to prominence is they were really popular in the community and then they became commercial as those kids grew up and started making it decisions so I don't know what are kids using today uh that's I think that's a good question um you know that maybe that'll be the Linux distribution of tomorrow at least some of the up and coming ones nothing's gonna happen to red hat or Sousa of course you know they're well-established great Linux distributions but I think that's how they come to prominence that's how we see the rise of Linux distribution as to what kids are using today in their University and lab environments all right so I think I hit on red hat we try and Retreat red hat and Susa equally because we support them equally so I'm going to give them an equal amount of time here on the on the left turn all right let's talk about Ubuntu a little bit now Ubuntu is radically different than red hat and Seuss and then it's packaging structure is really based on Deb packages and it's based on Debian testing debian's another Linux distribution um so it's it's kind of a clone these Linux distributions will clone each other too so there's a lot of Debian based Linux distributions and Ubuntu is one of those um they has its own installation process it has his own release cycle and it borrows Dev packages largely from Debian Ubuntu has an interesting release cycle unlike red hat and Susa in that they released a new Linux distribution every two years in April whether it's ready or not every two years in April and of course their version scheme reflects that so we see 22.04 which is the long-term support release of Ubuntu and this is these are the ones that hpe supports only the long-term support releases now every six months they release a new version to operating system but these are to be continued considered developer development releases just for testing we don't expect these to do like application Enterprise workloads because they only last they only get patches for what about six months or so I'm just looking at the Gantt chart here so if we're going to use a run Ubuntu an Enterprise type of environment let's go with those the ones released on even years in April those are the long term support ones so this we're in 22.04 um and we called it Jammy they have funny code names for their Linux distributions so Ubuntu isn't quite as Enterprise the Ubuntu tracks the newer Linux kernels it's a little more devops we're going to talk about the difference between devops and Enterprise management techniques um so you're going to see newer software the newer kernel um with Ubuntu you can see the newer software packages the stability might not be there because the stuff is so new not quite as tested as the more Enterprise Linux distributions like Susa and red hat so it's kind of but it fills a niche I think and and again I think I said it earlier that you know Ubuntu is completely free not only is in Liberty but as in beer you don't have to pay for Ubuntu at all unless you want to call them and get support uh which hpe can arrange and how long does this last I want to say it says 10 years guys over 10 years is how long we'll see in Ubuntu release last at least one of those long-term support releases where we see extended security maintenance now we're not going to see you're not going to run an old version of Ubuntu on a brand new piece of Hardware Hardware enablement only lasts a few years right and that's where we're working feverishly with canonical to make sure hpe Hardware is supported in Ubuntu kernels which usually isn't a problem because they track new kernels all right so we talked about red hat Susa uh we talked about Ubuntu and that way let's talk a little bit about Centos depending on who you ask Centos had at least a third of the Linux server installed base some people will say 50 percent because it was a red hat clone red Hat's a great uh Linux distribution and sent to us just took the red hat source code recompiled it byte for byte and uh released basically a free version of red hat Enterprise Linux and they called it sentos so that's why it's insanely popular so you could run anything that was certified in Red Hat Linux would naturally run on Centos and this this was available for decades probably just as long as red hat started as soon as red hat started charging for a red hat Enterprise Linux from a support and distribution perspective Centos came to life by Greg curtzer he put it together and it basically made red hat free again free as in beer they're both free as in Liberty well to an extent we'll talk a little bit about that as well um so what happened to Centos Centos is going away if it's not gone already so Centos 8 it's end of life sent to S7 it's going to be dead and gone by June so so what happened and so red hat kind of bought into the board and became a predominant boating uh company behind the Centos board and they decided just to end it and create something new call sent to a stream we'll talk about that in a little bit but what do you do when an operating system suddenly dies an operating system that had at least 30 percent of maybe the server Market um so what's the industry impact what's the migration path um you know sent to us is gone and a few other things have sprung up in the ashes of Centos we can talk about those a little bit and the reason they did this is because Red Hat stopped posting their source code so it's really hard to make a red hat clone now the red hat Enterprise end user license agreement actually changed and at the very top of the license I'll leave this interpretation to you guys I don't understand it personally it says that at the beginning of the U that says they don't attend interfere with your rights to software code under the terms of Open Source license an open source license of course means you can give somebody a program and they can run it and then if that person wants the source code of that application that you just gave them you're obligated to give it to them under the same license that that Source was found probably given to you and that's basically how it works with red hat so red hat doesn't own the vast majority of the source code in Red Hat Enterprise Linux the community does it's copyrighted for about under thousands of people so at the bottom the new thing in their end user license agreement is that they also are now saying and by contrast using subscription services in connection with any redistribution of software as a violation of the agreement I don't understand this personally so they they don't interfere with your rights to redistribute source code but at the same time they don't want to do business with you if you do I mean that's a that's a business decision um but that's this is what it says so interpret this however I'm not judging um you know they got a business to run um you know maybe this is a good idea maybe it's a bad idea I I don't know but this is the change to the red hat Enterprise Linux end user license agreement um so it's going to make it difficult for those red hat clones to exist right so the industry's still scrambling to replace Centos somehow and these other players have popped up we've got rocky Linux we've got Alma Linux we've got a new association called Enterprise Linux Association this comprised of ciq Oracle and Susa and all of these companies and organizations are kind of scrambling to create the next Centos so in the big picture Centos was a clone of red hat so I don't know if you can see my mouse but over here we'd see you know sentos derived from red hat but so what happened is we created a red hat created a brand new OS called Centos stream and they put it in front of red hat so red hat instead of uh you know contributing to Centos Red Hats now pulling from Centos stream does that make sense uh so stream is kind of a development version It's a this it's an incubator it's a distilling process of software and then once something stable and sent to a stream um this red hat will snapshot that and that will become Red Hat Enterprise Linux but in the meantime it's really not a stable operating system it's not something we'd recommend for production that's definitely interesting from an experimental perspective and of course there's Fedora where all of this is derived from this is really where software comes from the wild it gets put they're all thrown together and we'll see what happens I don't expect Fedora to be you know anywhere near as stable as as these other operating systems all right so that leaves these three down here we got the ELA that's the Enterprise Linux Association I don't think they actually have a distribution yet and we Linux they've been around for a while year two and we've got rocky Linux so Rocky Linux is still claiming to be bugged for bug compatible with red hat so they're still getting the red hat source code somehow I kind of know how but I'm not even going to say it for this um so they're still getting the source code without entering in a license agreement with red hat so Rocky Linux is still technically a red hat clone Alma Linux and Enterprise Linux Association by contrast they're going to go ahead and make the claim that they will be ABI compatible so they'll get maybe not the exact same source code but something sufficiently similar that your applications that were designed to run Red Hat will definitely run on Alma Linux or whatever the Enterprise Linux Association comes up with so think of these as the three and there's going to be more Community Enterprise Linux distributions Ela Alma and Rocky and I'm sure there will be more and the security guys also wanted me to mention that Phipps Rocky Linux actually has fips certification for uh for data and rest and data in Flight Alma does too at a cost and I don't honestly don't know what the ELA stuff is going to do as far as security certifications go because that's important it's as far as your risk tolerance goes in an Enterprise you want to make sure there's some level of certification or Assurance when it comes to security with these so this was a big slide to describe uh you know I could put there's I probably talk about this for for a full hour how you know we're getting these new Linux distributions that are replacing Centos and how they're getting the red hat source code and you know what barriers that red hat has just put up with their licensing agreement and sharing of source code you know it is it in violation of the GPL no probably not is it a good business decision I don't know I'm an engineer right I'm not allowed to make those decisions so that's Community Enterprise Linux this is where most of the interesting churn is right now is uh find trying to find a replacement percent OS which just had a huge amount of market share all right so if you don't know if you haven't heard about containers yet uh so you're still under your rock um so for those of us who rocks have been kicked over you you got to have some sort of container strategy container strategy to be a good Linux distribution today and with red hat that's no exception um what a lot of it's interesting a lot of uh well next Distributors are coming up with like an immutable Appliance to run containers um and and when it's like a read-only file system it's kind of like a container engine um and for Red Hat they're calling that core OS this is kind of like a file system image a really small a minimum number of drivers an application software just enough stuff so you can start throwing containers at it and put on a container workload in fact it will only run a containerized workload so with red hat openshift you know it'll if you have a bunch of bare metal out there it'll start spitting out core OS installations on all of all of your bare metal and then it'll use kubernetes or some sort of container orchestrator to start throwing out to container workloads at your core OS installed base um so what's interesting is you know that actually the bottom bullet here I actually read it from the documentation this is directly logging into a core OS machine is discouraged right so it really is an appliance um it's it's cool in that it prevents entropy you know there's not there's less system management associated with it it's very fixed function but it kind of calls under the question the whole ATT system Five release for Unix I ideology it posix ideology that upon Linux is based so it's kind of going that direction at least from a container perspective um so you know how do you start on drivers how do you install applications on the host OS uh flash firmware we have to answer those questions for these and we're working with red hat on on that now um core OS isn't a standalone product it is part of red hat openshift so if you're getting into their their larger container ecosystem core OS will be part of that so just be aware that yeah a lot of your container engines won't be traditional Linux operating system it's based on red hat use the same kernel but it's a wildly different way to deploy and manage a Linux based operating systems that's core Os from Red Hat um not to be outdone Seuss is actually probably taking this a little further um they have a couple of different uh containerized workload engines so it's very similar to core OS it's a very minimal OS just for containerized workloads again a mutable file system it's read only um you can update it but it's a different process to update the file system image so they have two things they're working on right now they have slee micro which is actually a SKU right now it's for containerized workloads that's available today but then they're looking at the larger Linux strategy and they're coming up with something called Susa adaptable Linux platform or Alp like that the mountains in Europe for uh one of the the current instance of this is called the Dolomite so this isn't a product by itself but it will be a framework for future Susa products okay so in fact we might see Celeste actually replaced like this by by replaced by Alps who's the Alp I don't know it's a possibility and of course they're going to use Rancher for container orchestration podman uh very similar to sleeve micro But ultimately different so this is Susa adaptable Linux platform for containerized workloads and of course we've already got slee micro they've already got their their their tight Appliance like a container engine there so this is this is something we're really watching now in fact I was out in the Czech Republic to meet with Susa to really talk about this during their asusa Labs event and so this is some really kind of exciting stuff that everyone is on board with at Susa and of course hpe is able to share in that development flea micro and out so container engine so like I said we might be going away from the traditional Unix type of thing where we have these just appliances or engines almost like firmware right you can always think of these container operating systems as firmware they're very similar um so how do we install drivers how do we do new hardware enablement um how do we monitor it um how do we do the management processor connectivity raid configuration and these are the hard questions I'm asking Sousa and red hat right we need to be able to do this because they'll say that every workload is containerizable right because that's a premise for these container engines any workload you want you can containerize it well the one you can't really containerize is a hardware management workload because we need access to the actual Hardware we can't be put in a little box a little tiny little container we need to talk to drivers we need to install drivers certain kernel IO ctls driver interfaces aren't available to us in container environments so these are the hard questions we're asking our Sousa and red hat we need because this has to work we have to manage our Hardware using these container operating systems these little container engines so that's something that we're working on right now and that's ultimately why I you know put a slide up here something to be aware of as we move away from a traditional Linux environment over to container engines all right container engine challenges all right let's shift gears a little bit we talked about a lot of different Linux distributions and there's a lot of different different ways we can manage these um there's there's two things that kind of emerged there's Enterprise versus devops and they're mutually exclusive they're both valid in their own way I mean there's nothing wrong with an Enterprise approach to managing servers and there's nothing wrong with the devops approach to managing servers but they do tend to be mutually exclusive I think hpe as a company has catered to the Enterprise approach where it's more solution oriented it's easy to use but probably a little less flexible whereas devops it's super flexible a lot of little tools but it's kind of hard to learn you know this is going to be all Python and ansible based in fact the Enterprise people are going to say well hey if I can't double click it then it cannot be done right it might not say that but it's going to be similar to that right on the devops side you know if they're going to say if I can't do it in Python then it cannot be done all right so these are two mutually exclusive approaches to Linux system management but they're equally valid in their own right so technical Industries are usually gravitating towards a devops approach to your Linux system deployment and management whereas we see more like Banks and governments companies that don't have i t is a core competency in their business you know they're going to be more Enterprise either they're going to they're gonna want that neck to choke they're gonna want somebody to call if it doesn't work and in a more solution oriented versus tool oriented which is what devops is so keep this in mind in your company or I know definitely in our company we're trying to support both we're not trying to force devops to be enterprisey customers and vice versa so we're doing a little bit of both so you'll see we have like you know ILO rest we're going to talk about restful interfaces for a lot of things ILO rest over here in the devops thing um and then over here we'll you know we'll have like one view those types of Technologies to support the Enterprise folks so just be aware there's two different system management styles and don't try and force one on the other uh hpes really do and I think doing a good job at supporting both uh almost equally I think we got a lot to learn on the devops approach I think we definitely got the Enterprise down but devops is still kind of up and coming and cool all right so hpe's contribution to providing Linux the software drivers firmware and we have something actually I manage this site it's called downloads.lynux.hpe.com so if you're in the business of Distributing Linux software maybe outside of a Linux distribution which is what we do um don't send customers to go download a CD-ROM image and Isa and then burn it to media and then you know take it and put it in a server I you know when we haven't done that since last century in the Linux Community we don't use CD media in fact downloading software with a web browser and then like you know transferring it over to server and then installing stock that's last decade okay all Linux software needs to be in an online repository it's basically like a big file server only it has some interesting metadata index underneath it so Linux native software configuration managers can go out there and find software using search commands download it install it so for the Sousa basins distributions it's going to be something like zipper and auto yast you can literally just say zipper install and the name of a driver and it'll go out to downloads.lynux.hpe.com you know if you're subscribed to a service pack for proliant repository install the driver set it up in your kernel maybe install any additional dependencies that would be required it just makes software installations so much easier and this is the expectation in the industry all of your software needs to be an online repositories and for for those of you at hpe here I'm looking at you if you've got software products come talk to me we'll get your software on downloads.lynx.hpe.com if it's not already out there and of course we support zipper yum apt fwget is kind of a similar tool that we're using for for firmware so all software really should be an online repository so if you're providing software for any Linux distribution that's how the links distros do it right um so I talked about devops a little bit and I say I mentioned restful apis Json redfish um so you know HP ILO management controllers all have the redfish specification that's all restful and that means you can use little bits of python to go out and download a Json index to to download files or maybe you can get the temperature of your system or you know number of CPUs so it all of this has to be scriptable and restful apis really make that that work well so like I said we got redfish ILO rest ILO rest is a client like for redfish to think of it that way and there's just an example that I put together here called fwget and this is using restful interfaces Json data structures and um out to an online repository that we just talked to where we're putting all of our firmware and you can just do something like fwget search dl380 and it does it does very simple output that you can parse with grep or said and it you know the newest firmware is first and then say okay here's a prime GL 380 gen10 then I say FW get download that file then I can say ILO rest slash fwpkg Flash the firmware in the name of the firmware file so the IL arrest client actually does a restful call out to the redfish interface on the ILO card and the ILO card actually does the flashing and what's cool about this is uh this works on any operating system right or more importantly no operating system so using restful interfaces in the hardware in ILO rest we can actually flash up all the firmware on a system even before we actually install the Linux distribution or any operating system on it um so this is really what you know kind of our contribution to the devops folks you know we've got the Enterprise stuff kind of handled with a system update manager one view but you know we're expanding definitely into devops and this is just kind of a practical example of using restful interfaces Json indexes just to search for firmware download it and Flash it I'm all using those devopsy kind of approaches or Technologies um and this is kind of a backup slide for that just this just shows what a Json index looks like it's not exactly human readable you know it's like ah there's a bunch of hexadecimal numbers I don't want to figure this out you know there's a bunch of weird this but this is this is each one of these interests these entries is a piece of firmware and an online repository for hpe firmware but down here in the bottom right you can see there's just with four loads codes or four lines of a python I can actually list all of the firmware in this repository specifically the description and date of all the firmware in the repository just four lines of python um it'll actually download this index parse it load it into a python data structure just in one command and then you know I can print it in in digest this any way I want and of course you know it comes in ansible and playbooks and things like that you know this just plays into all of that from a devops perspective so that's restful interfaces Json indexes and python stuff I don't know if this is getting into the weeds but you know I want to make sure I know this is a technical audience so I want to make sure I had something here if it's for you guys so I think that concludes my my presentation I know I've got some questions for you you guys there's going to be a poll that DDA is going to throw up and and you will have some questions for me and Karen squares is here who works with us in the Linux enablement lab so between Karen and I there's a there's a chance we're going to be able to answer your questions so so DDA I am going to hand it back to you to do some q a for us if that's okay and if you can fill out that poll I'm interested in the answers to your uh to these questions here that I have of you DDA I just launched the poll actually and people are already um answering so you can monitor that live and then I can share the result at the end so leave I'll leave it up for a few minutes but uh we already have a more than 30 responses there and yes please answer the question I think Karen already answered quite a bunch we have Philip providing uh additional insights on on the industry and the history of fedat so that's interesting uh feedback as well thank you and I think all the questions have been answered so far so please everybody if you have a running question for Craig that's probably the right time while while we look at the at the the poll and I will share it pretty soon we already have 96 answers that's great thank you very much any question for Craig yeah go ahead and Shout them out that's what we're here for all right so we've got one from Klaus about uh Oracle deal with the option of running Red Hat kernel how does oracle deal with that option of running that spread out kernel if you oh there we got lots of questions certainly do you see the Q a I think it'll be faster if you take a look yourself what I can do is stop sharing yeah I'm full screen here so Kyle said I think it was uh you're talking about the Oracle yeah they have two kernels they have the uh the the competitive the red hat compatibility kernel and they have the Oracle kernel which is kind of tuned for Oracle Linux so Oracle is part of that Ela Enterprise Linux Association I don't I don't have an answer to your question I don't know how they're going to get the red hat kernel the compatibility kernel I really don't okay someone wants to heal wants to know what is your favorite Linux you said you might see but which ones yeah no I no I don't think I can answer what my favorite ones because you know what my favorite one isn't going to be isn't going to work for everyone um yeah let me tell you it was on that list that is presented at the beginning and it was in the top 30. so I'm nowhere near the top

10 or so so yeah the one I'm actually running it right now on my desktop I hopefully I don't know I know you guys can't see it but yeah I have a favorite one I will tell you in private and I will deny that I answered that in public now it's really up to our customers as to what's best okay so we have uh uh gregoro that has uh that is asking her opinion that Debian has had always problem with FC which I I guess is fiber channel I'm supposing this is fiber channel any comment on that um so you know our fiber channel stuff I mean these are complicated pieces of Hardware so we push all of the drivers up to the git kernel for Linux so if Debian you know is using an old Linux kernel yeah they're probably they might have problems and they the Debian stable is usually very stable which also means pretty old so that can be a problem with Debian Debian the new Linux isn't something we explicitly support like you can't call us for help on it necessarily but we do enable the Linux kernel for Debbie and accepted them to do back ports use BPO kernels for Debian to get the latest drivers and Hardware enablement do we see Linux becoming more container focused uh this is a question from yeah absolutely I you know I think that was the gist of the almost my second half of the presentation here is is that container Focus um a lot of the vendors are saying that all workloads shall be containerized you will not run a traditional you know unix-like workload on and on an operating system not on on Hardware so yeah absolutely and I think the entire industry is racing to put something together to say there they have the best containerized workload so yeah that's that's the Forefront of our Focus right now uh do you have a slide that shows all kernel or Linux cannot release deadlines over the next 12 to 18 months for driver submissions um I don't have a slide like that um we usually like we'll have people commit upstream and then we'll work with red hat and say red hat these are the commits that we made to the Linux kernel in git what I need you to do is back Port each one of those commits to the red hat kernel we'll do the same thing for Susa so red hat has a very stable kernel version it doesn't change but they do introduce new features from upstream and in the form of back ports I don't know if that answers your question but that's kind of how it works we have feedback from Hill that says he found Ubuntu very easy to install use and work with we have Philip giving another hint at Talos Linux for for container oriented Linux distro and it's more advanced than core OS in in Philips open opinion somebody is asking if you ever met linu Stovall I've been in the same room with him but I don't think I ever shook his hand no not yet not yet um yeah he's up in Oregon I'm in California yeah that's actually it was uh in Portland where we were we were at least near each other now he's he's god-like in the industry he is he's a wonderful man I think we went we we got to the bottom of the question let me just end the poll so we get uh we can comment on the the results of the poll I think I can share the wizard I thought I could hold on all right thank you for answering these hold on uh stop sharing uh no I was sharing sorry yeah okay so everybody can see I guess the the poll uh result so do you want to comment anything on the the choice of Linux uh what type of customer Supports and the style of management Maybe is this what you expected it is it is kind of you know I'm always rooting for the underdogs you know I'm always interested in what Linux distribution is coming up next because we have to start enabling it now in order for it to work on hpe Hardware so yeah it's interesting to see Ubuntu Rising there you know red hat and Sousa those are uh those were expected um but it's interesting seeing you know Rocky Alma Debian or even other there's so many Linux distributions so yeah this is kind of what I expected this is interesting information and then you know Community versus commercial Linux um that's always an interesting question okay um while we're waiting for maybe a few more questions I will bring up a poll for the end of the session so that's more for us thank you for providing feedback there and uh where is the poll I'd stop sharing that one maybe [Music] so I'm launching a just a simple three question poll and we typically do at the end of our session thank you for providing feedback to us about the program itself um and right now I don't see any other burning questions on the Q a I guess you answered everything correct and Karen yeah thank you thank you thanks for attending everyone and the questions do you know how to read there is one question in the uh chat asking about for Edge Computing which distros have you been focusing your efforts on example raspberry so if you can see that one uh Craig yeah I'm not seeing the questions here but I think I got the gist of it so yeah Raspberry Pi is an extreme Edge device so we don't have anything specific for that even though I know Sousa has stuff booting on Raspberry Pi it's certainly possible but we do have you know Edge architectures and we do fully support you know red hat and Sousa on those Ubuntu has you know some edgy stuff they've been focusing on um so it's there but not you know at the Forefront of our attention right now thank you thanks Karen for pointing that out um I think this time we got them all and the poll session is quite well responded thank you very much everyone so thank you uh Craig and thank you Karen for answering questions in the backgrounds I think it was a great session and thank you everyone for attending I swear I'll do my best to find a session for uh October I got all my dates mixed up in my slides so sorry for that people complain about that yes we have a session on the 27th of September not October and the 25th of October not November so um we'll we'll come up with something for for the older sessions of course but uh thank you for being uh for attending those sessions very uh very good to have a community behind us so thank you and we'll talk to you next month thank you very much bye-bye Craig bye Karen thank you thank you DDA bye-bye

2023-09-28 05:27

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