Red Hat Inks Linux Tie-Up with Rakuten Mobile, Alma and EPEL
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The Fast Mode ☛ Red Hat Inks Linux Tie-Up with Rakuten Mobile, Rakuten Symphony at MWC
Red Hat announced at MWC that it will provide Rakuten Mobile access to its expertise, hardened technology, and proven history in managing complex, expansive Linux estates while enabling its own experts to focus on innovating and enhancing the customer experience. Red Hat will also provide the same solutions to Rakuten Symphony, a global provider of cloud-native open RAN infrastructure and services, to further enhance its platforms and solutions to empower telecommunication service providers with the necessary tools for operations. Additionally, Red Hat will support Rakuten Cloud’s efforts to certify its Cloud-Native Storage on Red Hat OpenShift for easier integration with Kubernetes-native tooling.
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Rakuten opts for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux for Real Time - Telecompaper EN
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LWN ☛ AlmaLinux considers EPEL 10 rebuild for older hardware
The AlmaLinux project has published a request for comments (RFC) on rebuilding Fedora's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), which provides additional software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives, to support older x86_64 hardware that is not supported by EPEL 10. While this may sound simple on the surface, the proposed rebuild carries a few potential risks that the AlmaLinux and EPEL contributors would like to avoid. The AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee (ALESCo) is currently considering feedback and will vote on the RFC in March.
Alma and EPEL
AlmaLinux is one of the projects that sprang up in the wake of Red Hat discontinuing CentOS Linux. The project provides a binary compatible clone of RHEL using sources from CentOS Stream, rather than attempting to be a 1:1 rebuild. It occasionally deviates from RHEL to provide faster security updates, provide expanded hardware support, or re-add features and packages that Red Hat has discontinued such as SPICE protocol support for QEMU, and Firefox and Thunderbird in AlmaLinux 10. Most of those changes have been fairly modest, but the project will be going a bit farther with the next major RHEL release.
The upcoming RHEL 10 release, and Stream 10, are only targeting x86_64 systems with the x86_64_v3 instruction set architecture (ISA), which means Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AVX2. The decision to drop support for v2 systems has not been entirely popular, since there are still recent CPUs (such as Intel's Atom series) that do not have support for AVX2.
To accommodate users who have hardware without AVX2 support, AlmaLinux is producing two builds of AlmaLinux 10—one which follows upstream Stream and RHEL with v3-optimized binaries by default, and one which targets x86_64_v2. However, that leaves a gap for users on the v2 builds: access to packages in the EPEL 10 repositories, which will also be built for v3 only and would not run on hardware that only supports v2.