Not again Red Hat

In this video Jeff Geerling accounced that “Corporate Open Source is Dead”. He already dropped support from his really good ansible playbooks. This was because Red Hat only distributes its sources to customers. Another brick in this wall was announced today by the great ELrepo project.

In this blogpost it was announced that RHEL made some changes in the upcoming 8.10 and 9.4 releases of RHEL and this will break some of the kernel modules that were created by elrepo to allow running RHEL with older cards – that are not official supported anymore. The fun thing is not the whole driver that was deprecated, but only some of the supported pci-id where removed.

Especially for home lab users this created a big problem. aacraid, megaraid_sas, mlx4 and mpt3sas are drivers that are used in a lot of home labs everywhere.

Again the overall intention from Red Hat are not the problem. If Red Hat would break support of that in RHEL 10 there would be no problems. It would be interesting to know if this is a unexpected consequence of an patch or a targeted business decision. Yes I know why the support was dropped by Red Hat, but Red Hat is not only forgetting it roots, but again kicked the non-prod users in the curb. Just after they droped Centos and broke there promis there as well.

At least for my homelab this creates an extra work to do, because my RAID Controller is on the deprecated list. At least AlmaLinux has undo this patch and you don’t even need elrepo to support his older hardware.

I was planning to reinstall the host anyway. I only have to decide to select Fedora or AlmaLinux. The time to decide that is coming earlier the I hoped.