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Upgrading from RHEL CentOS 7 to 8 or 9 ‐ Gotchas and Tips

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Carl George edited this page Sep 7, 2023 · 7 revisions

This document is intended for VFX and animation systems engineers to share tips and gotchas around upgrading from RHEL/CentOS 7 to RHEL/Rocky/AlmaLinux 9 to help other studios on their journey.

  • PCOIP

    • Audio - Audio will not work with pipewire until RHEL 9.3. There may be a PCOIP-side fix coming from HP sooner. In the meantime use Pulse Audio.
      • dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio
      • /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 may still be missing
        • /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
    • GDM needs to be enabled and running for the lockscreen to work on RHEL 9 when connecting over PCOIP.

  • HP ZCentral Remote Boost

    • Has been extended for sale until HP Anywhere (previously known as Teradici) has feature parity.
    • Version that supports EL9 is Xorg only (no Wayland support).
    • Version supported under EL9 is only 22.1.1 +

  • Mechdyne TGX

    • Current version supports EL9
    • Version that supports EL9 is Xorg only (no Wayland support)

  • Cgroups v2 is the default. This may need to be dropped to v1 depending on the environment.

  • GNOME tips:

    • Disable animations
    • Look into compatibility of any extensions you have. Some extensions have been made redundant with GNOME 40, so they may not be needed.
    • Wayland is the default with GNOME in EL 9.x, and this should be changed to X11. Even though NVIDIA drivers have come a long way and support Wayland much better than they did not so long ago, they still are not 100% ready for production.
    • If you use Fleet Commander for site-wide Gnome / MATE settings mgmt, the current version does not seem (yet) to work on/with EL9

  • NVIDIA drivers

    • Depending on your hardware, 5XX drivers+ may be required for compatibility with the newer kernel in EL 9.
    • Newer drivers drop support for several older GPUs that might still be around in studios.
    • That said, some older Nvidia GPUs are supported in EL9 by using the latest "legacy" versions of the drivers. For example, a recent 470 series driver works on a EL 9.2 workstation with an old Quadro K4200 (the K4200 isn't supported by the 5XX drivers).

  • Various packages / software dropped from main EL repo

  • Qt 5

    • Qt v5.15.2’s QtWebEngine library does not build out of the box on EL 9. QtWebEnginerequires Python2 and a minor patch to get it to building with GCC11. [Courtesy of David Aguilar (WDAS)]
      • qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/perfetto/src/trace_processor/containers/string_pool.h was missing #include <algorithm> and #include <limits>.
      • qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/breakpad/breakpad/src/client/linux/handler/exception_handler.cc needed an (int) cast for std::max(16384, (int)SIGSTKSZ) ).
      • Most interestingly to the VFX Reference Platform, Qt 5.15.2 requires Python2 in order to build QtWebEngine:https://doc.qt.io/Qt-5/qtwebengine-platform-notes.html#all-platforms

  • RenderMan

    • The it viewer requires libicu.so.50 which is provided by RHEL 7 but requires the libicu50 compatibility package from EPEL on RHEL 8 or RHEL 9. This package was added to EPEL for VFX studio use by @carlwgeorge from the Red Hat CPE team.
    • prman requires ncurses-compat-libs in order to provide the libtinfo.so.5 shared library.

  • Deadline

    • The vendor documentation suggests a manual hack to get a copy of the libffi.so.6 library.
    • RHEL 9 users should instead install libffi3.1 from EPEL, which will provide this library. This package was added to EPEL for VFX studio use by @jonathanspw from the Alma Infrastructure team.

  • Known production software releases working on RHEL 8 (GNOME) without any special tweaks. [Used in Production at SHED]

    • Maya 2023
    • Houdini 18.5
    • Nuke/Hiero 12.0
    • RV 2023
    • SubstancePainter 8
    • Redshift 3.0
    • Mtoa 4.2
    • Deadline 10.0

  • Max PID is 7 digits on 9.x vs 6 digits on 7.x. That might trip up pipeline code that makes assumptions based on 6 digits. Default can be adjusted in /usr/lib/sysctl.d/50-pid-max.conf

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