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The default RHEL on AWS is loaded with a bunch of a crap - supposedly Redhat officially supplies the distro, but one really has to wonder if a single week of en

The default RHEL on AWS is loaded with a bunch of a crap - supposedly Redhat officially supplies the distro, but one really has to wonder if a single week of engineering time has ever went into this. I mean seriously WiFi-drivers?! [1] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/review/product-reviews/ref=dtl_prp_reviews_read_more?ie=UTF8&asin=B007ORSS8I#_39EHYSB2KKP3X https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/review/product-reviews/re...

PaulHoule 11y ago
RHAT is a great business in terms of its stock price but I am not the fan I used to be. I started w/ Slackware and moved to Red Hat and then Fedora but eventually RH and Fedora became "the Linux that couldn't" when I was installing on either an old or new machine. On the same machine Ubuntu would install just fine. I run a Windows desktop now and mostly use Ubuntu Linux in AWS, sometimes inside a VM on my local machine. I used to run the RH-derived AWS Linux, but eventually I learned how to do things easily in Ubuntu, such as installing and maintaning an Oracle JVM, that are hard in Red Hat. Definitely an enthusiast could find a solution with RHEL, but having a server OS that "just works" is what you need if you are the guy who splits his time between devops and bizdev.
avar 11y ago
What would be the benefit of slowing the release process of RHEL on AWS by pruning it down to the bare essentials? Is redundant stuff like WiFi-drivers & firmware really taking that much space that it matters?
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  maybe, maybe not. What that tells me though, is that they didn't sit down and say: "Here's how we optimize this to work for the cloud". I can't say other distro's do either, but it seems like something they should do
  - avar 11y ago
    I don't think they should. This way lies madness. You want e.g. the kernel & packages to be pruned down to only have the things needed for each cloud host? That means that for N cloud hosts Red Hat would have to potentially build N different patches for any update or security fix. Now you can't certify software to run on "RHEL 7" anymore, it has to be "RHEL 7, assuming it has XYZ, which some cloud hosts don't". It can be done, but it's a huge hassle, it's much easier to just ship the same distro to everyone. Space is cheap.
    - CaptSpify 11y ago
      > That means that for N cloud hosts Red Hat would have to potentially build N different patches for any update or security fix. Why would they have to do that? AFAIK, patches apply to packages, not the entire distro. If $package_x isn't installed, it doesn't get the patch. If it is installed, it does get the patch. And for me, the concern isn't space, as much as running processes, and littered un-needed files.
      - avar 11y ago
        If you're concerned about either of those RHEL is not the distro for you. It has a bunch of running processes, some of them are even written in Python! Talk about unoptimal. Similarly it's not the smallest Linux distro by far. I think this whole line of argument is just some misplaced nostalgia for distro micro-optimization. It's not the mid-90s anymore. Space and CPU is cheap, you're not going to gain anything significant by trimming down your distro. If those things were actually important you wouldn't be using Azure in the first place.

PaulHoule 11y ago

RHAT is a great business in terms of its stock price but I am not the fan I used to be. I started w/ Slackware and moved to Red Hat and then Fedora but eventually RH and Fedora became "the Linux that couldn't" when I was installing on either an old or new machine. On the same machine Ubuntu would install just fine. I run a Windows desktop now and mostly use Ubuntu Linux in AWS, sometimes inside a VM on my local machine. I used to run the RH-derived AWS Linux, but eventually I learned how to do things easily in Ubuntu, such as installing and maintaning an Oracle JVM, that are hard in Red Hat. Definitely an enthusiast could find a solution with RHEL, but having a server OS that "just works" is what you need if you are the guy who splits his time between devops and bizdev.

avar 11y ago

What would be the benefit of slowing the release process of RHEL on AWS by pruning it down to the bare essentials? Is redundant stuff like WiFi-drivers & firmware really taking that much space that it matters?

CaptSpify 11y ago
maybe, maybe not. What that tells me though, is that they didn't sit down and say: "Here's how we optimize this to work for the cloud". I can't say other distro's do either, but it seems like something they should do
- avar 11y ago
  I don't think they should. This way lies madness. You want e.g. the kernel & packages to be pruned down to only have the things needed for each cloud host? That means that for N cloud hosts Red Hat would have to potentially build N different patches for any update or security fix. Now you can't certify software to run on "RHEL 7" anymore, it has to be "RHEL 7, assuming it has XYZ, which some cloud hosts don't". It can be done, but it's a huge hassle, it's much easier to just ship the same distro to everyone. Space is cheap.
  - CaptSpify 11y ago
    > That means that for N cloud hosts Red Hat would have to potentially build N different patches for any update or security fix. Why would they have to do that? AFAIK, patches apply to packages, not the entire distro. If $package_x isn't installed, it doesn't get the patch. If it is installed, it does get the patch. And for me, the concern isn't space, as much as running processes, and littered un-needed files.
    - avar 11y ago
      If you're concerned about either of those RHEL is not the distro for you. It has a bunch of running processes, some of them are even written in Python! Talk about unoptimal. Similarly it's not the smallest Linux distro by far. I think this whole line of argument is just some misplaced nostalgia for distro micro-optimization. It's not the mid-90s anymore. Space and CPU is cheap, you're not going to gain anything significant by trimming down your distro. If those things were actually important you wouldn't be using Azure in the first place.