Support for RHEL?

Discuss issues related to installing or building
barbara
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by barbara »

Thanks for the confirmation. We are moving all of our CI Unix VM's to use Docker which is a bit of work but well worth it. Ansel has just started the initial configuration but it does look like RHEL version 8 is the best choice.

What is holding things up is the release of CentOS 8 which is what we will actually put on our supported list.

Barbara
barbara
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by barbara »

Centos 8 was finally released and it will be added to our CI by the end of this year.

Barbara
marlowa
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by marlowa »

ansel wrote: Sun Mar 25 2018 4:55 pm Unfortunately it appears the compiler shipped with RHEL/CentOS 7 is GCC 4.8.5, which is far too old to have the level of C++14 support that CopperSpice requires.
That used to be the case but not any more. For some time gcc7 has been available and gcc8 support is now being added.
marlowa
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by marlowa »

barbara wrote: Sat Oct 26 2019 10:01 pm Centos 8 was finally released and it will be added to our CI by the end of this year.

Barbara
FWIW, centos8 ships with gcc8.
barbara
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by barbara »

Centos 8 binaries were added to our CI and support platforms with the CS 1.6.2 release. As per our supported list in the Overview docs, we are indeed using gcc 8.2.1.

Barbara
seasoned_geek
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by seasoned_geek »

I'm curious to find out about RHEL 6.

The version of Qt 5 on RHEL 6 has, shall we say, "not good" HiDPI support. One customer has now standardized on $300 4K monitors as their new "desktop standard." Many of the screens now look like doo-doo all because a better monitor was installed. Video card, driver, OS all remained the same. This has lead to some serious raised voices.

I don't currently have a 4K monitor to test any of this with. I haven't even looked into how CopperSpice supports it. Do we have to do the hokey

Code: Select all

setAttribute(Qt::AA_UseHighDpiPixmaps, true);
Or is it just automagic because what is under the hood is smart enough to identify monitor resolution and simply adjust everything?

These two things:

https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_api/highdpi-c.html

https://forum.copperspice.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1327

Combined with this slide show

https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/slides/2019/High%20Performance%20Graphics_MeetingCpp1655.pdf

kind of imply it is automatically handled under the hood via Vulkan. The 3D imaging comment on the slides was kind of interesting too, but for someone else.

I do disagree with one point on the slides.

average around 1000 cores

Many in the field have 16 or fewer CUDA. The GeForce 630 family was wildly popular because Newegg was selling them for < $50. They had 2Gig of RAM and 384 CUDA. I own at least 3 of those. Lots of my customers have them as well. They were the best bang for the buck. The GTX 650 cards appear to be the current replacement and they still have only 384 CUDA.

At any rate, the real question here is two fold:

1) Can CopperSpice build on RHEL 6?
2) When built on RHEL 6 will it have the full HiDPI support that exists on RHEL 6
barbara
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by barbara »

At any rate, the real question here is two fold:

1) Can CopperSpice build on RHEL 6?
2) When built on RHEL 6 will it have the full HiDPI support that exists on RHEL 6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an LTS only distribution. Version 6 was based on Fedora 12 from November 2010, which did not support C++11. The CS team watched this very carefully and version 7 used a very old version of gcc. The first version of Red Hat which provided modern C++ support was RHEL 8 and this is on the list of our supported platforms and part of our CI.

Unless Red Hat changes version 6 or version 7 these are not releases we can support.

In terms of our current High DPI support in CopperSpice, we are currently using platform specific solutions. This has some interesting corner cases and there are better ways to solve high dpi support. Our CsPaint library is still under development, however the ideas we presented are valid and accurate. Once this library is a bit further along it will be merged into the paint drawing event system in CS. This is a complicated task but the results should be really good.

Barbara
seasoned_geek
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by seasoned_geek »

I hear what you say, but it appears they have since provided a compiler upgrade path.

I'm not a subscriber
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1144903

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_developer_toolset/6/html/user_guide/sect-gcc-cpp
====
The mixing of objects, binaries and libraries, built by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or 7 system toolchain GCC using the -std=c++0x or -std=gnu++0x flags, with those built with the -std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 or -std=c++14 or -std=gnu++14 flags using the GCC in Red Hat Developer Toolset is explicitly not supported.
====

Seems to imply devtoolset for RHEL 6 duth support such standards.

Much of this conversation is fallout from a qt-interest thread. I asked here because of the Vulcan thing and this message.

The original requestor and his company appear to be left twisting in the breeze because Qt continued marching down the XCB path and ditched providing XCB

Theoretically CopperSpice could be a path forward for them, depending on any porting issues.

The bulk of the support contract buyers, at least those with deeper pockets, need 15+ year LTS, not 7.
barbara
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Re: Support for RHEL?

Post by barbara »

Theoretically CopperSpice could be a path forward for them, depending on any porting issues.

The bulk of the support contract buyers, at least those with deeper pockets, need 15+ year LTS, not 7.
Thanks for letting us know that Red Hat version 6 or 7 has a option for a new compiler. We checked this out and it appears they have moved to gcc 6.2 which only goes through C++14. CopperSpice depends on a good deal of functionality, type traits, and algorithms which were added in C++17.

We are available to work with any company and discuss how they can move forward with CopperSpice. Our team is growing and we have developers who can support long term projects. There are many possibilities and options. Please have any company or developer who is interested in pursuing a custom support contract/subscription email us and provide their requirements.

Please include the following and any other relevant requirements.

exact required platforms and versions
approximate duration of support
version of CopperSpice to support
exact libraries in CS to support
will current updates to CS be required, if so are there any restrictions
approximate number of CS users
estimated turn around time for requests

Barbara
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