CentOS 7 potential release

No more easy editing/understanding grub.conf

True, the grub2 config is horrible.

No more easy to understand /etc/init.d

It's a bit more complicated, but not too bad:

Instead of "/etc/init.d/thing restart" you type "systemctl restart thing"

Instead of chkconfig --list, you type "systemctl list-dependencies"

Writing the equivalent script with systemd is much cleaner with less hacks, particularly for launching as different users and doing locking.

No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)

By default. It's fine once you get the hang of the new syntax:

journalctl --since=today --follow

Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in real world use for databases, etc.

Depends on the workload. Speed is only one part of it. For some benchmarks by phoronix see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315...

You don't like systemd but it's probably time to accept the fact that it has "won". Most major distros including Debian is switching to it so it will get harder and harder to avoid. Might as well make the effort to learn it now.

You can enable text log files by installing 'rsyslog'. You only have to install the package, no further configuration is needed.

> No more easy editing/understanding grub.conf

Oh, that's beautiful. And if you want to get s..t done, you can't even quickly search the manpage, because for religious reasons, GNU projects use that weird (and traditionally utterly verbose) info system. But hey, GNU is for GNU's Not Unix, so we shouldn't be too surprised ...

It's not like I didn't appreciate what the GNU project has done for the free software world, but it's so annoying that they seem to be focused more on religious matters than on writing good (well-documented, easy-to-configure, non-bloated) software.

I'm doing more and more server stuff with the BSDs, simply because the docs are so well-written and if I want to understand some part of the system, it doesn't feel like there are numerous layers of abstractions hiding away the interesting parts from me.

XFS and its lack of data journaling (it only journals its own metadata) is notorious for corrupting data on power loss and kernel crashes. It performs well only under specific workloads and hardware setups.

Why choose it as the default filesystem in an enterprise-oriented distro?

XFS is a dealbreaker for me. Nothing but bad experiences with that particular FS, especially when the filecount goes up.

Thanks for posting this. That's what i was expecting.

Does any of that really improve my day?

Nope. In fact most of it makes it worse and adds friction. More cogs turning in different directions.

Will keep our devops stuff on CentOS 6.5 for at least another 4 years...

> systemd replaces init.d

CentOS 6 had Upstart, right? Which is likely to become deprecated due to the fact that Ubuntu is also moving to systemd.

Sure, Red Hat are the ones pushing systemd, but some disruptive change away from Upstart was inevitable.

I think its a RC of CentOS 7 because of "POTENTIAL" word .

As excited as I am for 7.0 I highly dislike the systemd and grub changes. I'll wait for benchmarks before I decide to go to 7.0 or fully switch my stack to Debian

It's quite sad, in my opinion, that this is halfway down the page while yet another beating of the dead horse that is the systemd flam^H^H^H^H discussion is the most visible comment thread. Thank you for posting this.

Care to elaborate?

Systemd has a few nice features that I (as a systems admin of thousands of servers) really like such as:

    - simple "init script" like upstart, so magical or crappy shell scripts from vendors are a thing of the past. A standardized unit file

    - Ulimit support natively as part of the format

    - Limiting via memory/disk/cpu cgroups to contain buggy apps (hello mysql!)

    - Process restarting so tools like supervisord, monit, runit, etc are no longer necessary

    - It can _always_ stop an errant daemon as it uses control groups to do so, sysv init was sometimes buggy in this regard

    - Private /tmp (via filesystem namespaces), limiting system calls a service can run, tcp wrappers, read only parts of the filesystem (like /etc) are all trivial to add to any legacy service such as bind or sendmail and a supported part of the systemd unit file definition.

As an _actual_ user who uses RHEL/Debian/etc on bare metal at scale, I really see nothing but awesome in RHEL7. It is just like I see awesome in Fedora 20 or in the latest Ubuntu/Debian. The Linux ecosystem has massively grown. Now we have a serious engineering company putting a lot of resources into supporting a new operating system. I'd love to see some of the technical reasons you have the opinion you do.

the site is not loading what's new besides upgrades?

Anything that is in the standard release of RHEL7 will be in CentOS7. But for sanity sake I checked one of the 7 mirrors and there is an HAproxy (1.5) RPM: http://mirrors.easynews.com/linux/centos/7/os/x86_64/Package...

It honestly isn't. The documentation is really good if you know how to use google.