Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : IBM on "When will Redhat Linux Enterprise Server 3 be supported?"

We are heavily into using RedHat Linux in our organisation, and have many versions ranging from 6.2, through 7.x, and have recently started to focus on using the 'Enterprise' class of offerings, ES2.1 and ES3. As many of you are aware, Domino only runs Uni-processor on ES2.1, and is unsupported on ES3.

I asked an IBM Business Partner "When will Redhat Linux Enterprise Server 3 be supported?"

This morning, I got this response...

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It seems that the answer is that it won't be supported, the technical reasons for this are detailed below.

In Domino 7 development is taking the work done for Domino 6.5 for Linux on zSeries and moving it over to Intel. Specifically, this work is based on the epoll kernel API that allows Lotus to use Domino "Thread Pools" to support clients instead of the "Thread per Connection" model used on Linux today. The "Thread per Connection" model is the fundamental bottleneck for Linux scalability. Internally, "Thread Pools" are handled differently to "Thread per Connection" model in Domino. As a result, Lotus can only develop one connection model for Domino 7. That model will be "Thread Pools" based on the epoll API.

United Linux:
UL 1.0 SP2 supports epoll today
Domino 7 will support UL 1.0 (and likely UL 2.0 post GA)
This solution will scale comparable to other platforms

RedHat:
RedHat AS 2.1 and EL 3.0 do NOT support epoll
Domino 7 will NOT support RH AS 2.1
Domino 7 will NOT support RH EL 3.0
RedHat EL 4.0 will support epoll
RedHat GA Date is TDB (projected -> 4Q04-1Q05)
Lotus will plan to pick up RedHat EL4.0 support in a 7.0.1 / 7.0.2
depending on GA date of D7 and Redhat 4.0.

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Any comments?

I know that Domino _is_ supported on UnitedLinux, but we'd really prefer to stick with RedHat as we've a very strong internal knowledge of this brand of Linux and don't want to have to change to UL.

Darren