[Users] OpenVZ legacy on Skylake CPU / 2.6 EOL

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> is somebody on this list running OpenVZ legacy kernel 2.6.32 on Intel
> Skylake CPUs?
> 
> As far as I know kernel 2.6.32 has EOL end of February, does this
> influence OpenVZ?

The upstream 2.6.32 will be EOL'ed but OpenVZ Legacy uses RHEL's 2.6.32 kernel that has a large number of patches provided by Red Hat with additional features and drivers backported from a number of newer kernels.  Red Hat provides a refresh every 6 months with their minor version releases (currently on RHEL 6.7 with 6.8 coming out RSN).  Here's the RHEL6 history thus far:

6.1 - 19 May 2011 (kernel 2.6.32-131)
6.2 - 6 December 2011 (kernel 2.6.32-220)
6.3 - 20 June 2012 (kernel 2.6.32-279)
6.4 - 21 February 2013 (kernel 2.6.32-358)
6.5 - 21 November 2013 (kernel 2.6.32-431)
6.6 - 13 October 2014 (kernel 2.6.32-504)
6.7 - 22 July 2015 (kernel 2.6.32-573)

The end of "Production Phase 3" is 30 November 2020.  For an explanation of the RHEL lifecycle, see:
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

I assume OpenVZ Legacy will be supported until Red Hat ends support... or at least that is what they did with their RHEL4-based (2.6.9) kernel... and continue to do with their RHEL5-based (2.6.18) kernel.

Regarding Skylake, I really don't know.  According to this post, initial support was added to the Linux kernel with the release of 3.18 or later:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4NDc

Here's a list of supported CPUs by Red Hat:
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/intel

Here's a list of Skylake server CPU model numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29#Server_Processors

I'm fairly ignorant of the specifics but eyeballing those two it appears RHEL 6.7 supports all E3-12XX V5 CPUs.

Does that answer the questions you had?

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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Belgrade, MT 59714
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