RHEL8 Archives - RHD Blog

Performance improvements in OVN: Past and future

By Mark Michelson January 2, 2019January 1, 2019

OVN (Open Virtual Network) is a subcomponent of Open vSwitch (OVS). It allows for the expression of overlay networks by connecting logical routers and logical switches. Cloud providers and cloud management systems have been using OVS for many years as a performant method for creating and managing overlay networks.

Lately, OVN has come into its own because it is being used more in Red Hat products. The result has been an increased amount of scrutiny for real-world scenarios with OVN. This has resulted in new features being added to OVN. More importantly, this has led to tremendous changes to improve performance in OVN.

In this article, I will discuss two game-changing performance improvements that have been added to OVN in the past year, and I will discuss future changes that we may see in the coming year.

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Using eXpress Data Path (XDP) maps in RHEL 8 Beta: Part 2

By Paolo Abeni December 17, 2018December 14, 2018

Diving into XDP

In the first part of this series on XDP, I introduced XDP and discussed the simplest possible example. Let’s now try to do something less trivial, exploring some more-advanced eBPF features—maps—and some common pitfalls.

XDP is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, which you can download and run now.

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How to install Java 8 and 11 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta

By Severin Gehwolf December 10, 2018December 12, 2018

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 Beta, two major versions of Java will be supported: Java 8 and Java 11. In this article, I’ll refer to Java 8 as JDK (Java Development Kit) 8 since we are focusing on the development aspect of using Java. JDK 8 and JDK 11 refer to Red Hat builds of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 respectively. Through this article, you’ll learn how to install and run simple Java applications on RHEL 8 Beta, how to switch between two parallel installed major JDK versions via alternatives and how to select one of the two JDKs on a per-application basis.

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Achieving high-performance, low-latency networking with XDP: Part I

By Paolo Abeni December 6, 2018December 12, 2018

XDP: From zero to 14 Mpps

In past years, the kernel community has been using different approaches in the quest for ever-increasing networking performance. While improvements have been measurable in several areas, a new wave of architecture-related security issues and related counter-measures has undone most of the gains, and purely in-kernel solutions for some packet-processing intensive workloads still lag behind the bypass solution, namely Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), by almost an order of magnitude.

But the kernel community never sleeps (almost literally) and the holy grail of kernel-based networking performance has been found under the name of XDP: the eXpress Data Path. XDP is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, which you can download and run now.

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Network debugging with eBPF (RHEL 8 Beta)

By Matteo Croce December 3, 2018December 1, 2018

Introduction

Networks are fun to work with, but often they are also a source of trouble. Network troubleshooting can be difficult, and reproducing the bad behavior that is happening in the field can be painful as well.

Luckily, there are some tools that come to the aid: network namespaces, virtual machines, tc, and netfilter. Simple network setups can be reproduced with network namespaces and veth devices, while more-complex setups require interconnecting virtual machines with a software bridge and using standard networking tools, like iptables or tc, to simulate the bad behavior. If you have an issue with ICMP replies generated because an SSH server is down, iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-unreachable in the correct namespace or VM can do the trick.

This article describes using eBPF (extended BPF), an extended version of the Berkeley Packet Filter, to troubleshoot complex network issues. eBPF is a fairly new technology and the project is still in an early stage, with documentation and the SDK not yet ready. But that should improve, especially with XDP (eXpress Data Path) being shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, which you can download and run now.

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What, No Python in RHEL 8 Beta?

By Langdon White November 27, 2018December 19, 2018

TL;DR Of course we have Python! You just need to specify if you want Python 3 or 2 as we didn’t want to set a default. Give yum install python3 and/or yum install python2 a try. Or, if you want to see what we recommend you install yum install @python36 or yum install @python27. Read on for why:

For prior versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and most Linux Distributions, users have been locked to the system version of Python unless they got away from the system’s package manager. While this can be true for a lot of tools (ruby, node, Perl, php) the Python use case is more complicated because so many Linux tools (like yum) rely on Python. In order to improve the experience for RHEL 8 users, we have moved the Python used by the system “off to the side” and we introduced the concept of Application Streams based on Modularity.

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Support Lifecycle for Clang/LLVM, Go, and Rust

By Bob Davis November 20, 2018November 19, 2018

On the heels of our recently announcement, General Availability of Clang/LLVM 6.0, Go 1.10, and Rust 1.29, I want to share how we’ll be supporting them going forward. Previously, these packages had been in “Technology Preview” status, which means that they were provided for “you to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process”, and were “not fully supported under Red Hat Subscription Level Agreements, may not be functionally complete, and are not intended for production use”.

So now that we’ve promoted them to fully supported status, what does that mean? In the simplest terms, General Availability (GA) means that these packages have officially entered the “Full Support Phase” of their lifecycle:

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Introducing Application Streams in RHEL 8

By Langdon White November 15, 2018November 15, 2018

With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) we have tried to greatly simplify the layout of the content available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The main repository, BaseOS, provides the parts of the distribution that give you a running userspace on physical hardware, a virtual machine, a cloud instance or a container. The Application Stream (AppStream) repository provides all the applications you might want to run in a given userspace. The Supplemental repository provides other software that has special licensing. The CodeReady Linux Builder provides mostly build time components for developers (see Introducing CodeReady Linux Builder).

As a result, most RHEL 8 systems will only need two repositories enabled. However, this may lead to the the question, where do I find alternate versions of software if there is only 1 application repository? In prior versions, you would look to the RHSCL or Extras repositories. However, in RHEL 8, through a new technology called Modularity, we can offer those alternate versions in the same physical repository.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta is here

By Mike Guerette November 15, 2018December 11, 2018

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta is here

And it’s been built with production stability and development agility in mind.

There’s so much to say about RHEL 8 Beta, but I want to focus on just a few points from the corporate announcement that highlight Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta as a developer platform that:

Simplifies application development – with less setup and config effort, you can more quickly get to writing code
Is the easiest RHEL yet for developers that are new to Linux
Is for traditional and cloud/container applications with many new tools for both
Already delivers dozens of tools to build and test applications

Now let’s zoom in on what these mean.

Download the RHEL 8 Beta here.

“Too slow, too fast”

We’ve gotten this feedback a lot when discussing availability and support of development packages. To address this dichotomy, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta has built in the concept of Application Streams to deliver userspace packages (programming languages, compilers, databases, etc.) more simply and with greater flexibility – this addresses the “too slow”. For the “too fast” requirement, there are also “Core” components that have the same lifecycle as the operating system – 10 years. Users will often have a version in each grouping. Application Streams – think of them as “son of Software Collections” – are a simpler way to deliver this modularity with improved installation, use, and re-use

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Introducing CodeReady Linux Builder

By Langdon White November 15, 2018November 15, 2018

The RHEL8 Beta introduces a new repository, the CodeReady Linux Builder (or “Builder” for short) that developers may need while developing applications for RHEL. As you all know “developer” is not a one size fits all term. As a result, I am taking this opportunity to try to explain when you might need Builder enabled for your development activities.

Continue reading Introducing CodeReady Linux Builder

Blog Articles

Diving into XDP

XDP: From zero to 14 Mpps

Introduction

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta is here

“Too slow, too fast”