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We've been trying to prepare for the EOL/EOS for CentOS by moving to AlmaLinux 8.7. For many of our machines, we're using Carbon Black (CB) 2.14.0 for security. But VMWare/CB support is telling us that CB won't work on AlmaLinux until Q3, even though they claim it works fine on RHEL 8.7, something about bpf support in the kernel. This makes no sense to me. Shouldn't the kernels be identical or virtually identical?

Anyone have any experience with this? Is anyone here running CB successfully on RHEL 8.7?

Thomas J. Girsch
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  • `This makes no sense to me.`. That's pretty much the story of Linux in a nutshell. The fragmented ecosystem leads to situations like this. And the issue isn't that they are identical, the product needs to be tested. – Greg Askew Jan 13 '23 at 08:31

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Ask their support to clarify if it cannot work, and cite the specific technical reason. Or if they are not willing to support your OS at this time. Good technical support will make that distinction.

Yes, expect RHEL rebuilds (Alma, Rocky) to be ABI compatible at the same patch level. Consider trying it on Alma without their blessing, to push them on this matter. Or ask about other EL 9 builds, as Alma 9 presumably has these features.

Should you find this thing important, express your displeasure to the vendor. A 6 month delay before it reaches essentially the same distro could be shortened considerably, depending on risk tolerance. If for example, the developer also runs automated tests on Alma, that could improve confidence, well before any time consuming testing validated the distro.

John Mahowald
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  • We tested on Alma and it seemed not to work. Gave a kernel error. What's weird is that we've been running it for years on CentOS 7 without issue. I'm having a hard time figuring out why Alma 8.7 would lack something that CentOS 7 has. – Thomas J. Girsch Jan 17 '23 at 01:20