May
10
2022
--

Spring Cleaning: Discontinuing RHEL 6/CentOS 6 (glibc 2.12) and 32-bit Binary Builds of Percona Software

Discontinuing RHEL 6/CentOS 6

Discontinuing RHEL 6/CentOS 6As you are probably aware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6 or EL 6 in short) officially reached “End of Life” (EOL) on 2020-11-30 and is now in the so-called Extended Life Phase, which basically means that Red Hat will no longer provide bug fixes or security fixes.

Even though EL 6 and its compatible derivatives like CentOS 6 had reached EOL some time ago already, we continued providing binary builds for selected MySQL-related products for this platform.

However, this became increasingly difficult, as the MySQL code base continued to evolve and now depends on tools and functionality that are no longer provided by the operating system out of the box. This meant we already had to perform several modifications in order to prepare binary builds for this platform, e.g. installing custom compiler versions or newer versions of various system libraries.

As of MySQL 8.0.26, Oracle announced that they deprecated the TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 connection protocols and plan to remove these in a future MySQL version in favor of the more secure TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 protocols. TLSv1.3 requires that both the MySQL server and the client application be compiled with OpenSSL 1.1.1 or higher. This version of OpenSSL is not available in binary package format on EL 6 anymore, and manually rebuilding it turned out to be a “yak shaving exercise” due to the countless dependencies.

Our build & release team was able to update the build environments on all of our supported platforms (EL 7, EL 8, supported Debian and Ubuntu versions) for this new requirement. However, we have not been successful in getting all the required components and their dependencies to build on EL 6, as it would have required rebuilding quite a significant amount of core OS packages and libraries to achieve this.

Moreover, switching to this new OpenSSL version would have also required us to include some additional shared libraries in our packages to satisfy the runtime dependencies, adding more complexity and potential security issues.

In general, we believe that running a production system on an OS that is no longer actively supported by a vendor is not a recommended best practice from a security perspective, and we do not want to encourage such practices.

Because of these reasons and to simplify our build/release and QA processes, we decided to drop support for EL 6 for all products now. Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.27 was the last version for which we built binaries for EL 6 against the previous version of OpenSSL.

Going forward, the following products will no longer be built and released on this platform:

  • Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 and 8.0
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7
  • Percona XtraBackup 2.4 and 8.0
  • Percona Toolkit 3.2

This includes stopping both building RPM packages for EL 6 and providing binary tarballs that are linked against glibc 2.12.

Note that this OS platform was also the last one on which we still provided 32-bit binaries.

Most of the Enterprise Linux distributions have stopped providing 32-bit versions of their operating systems quite some time ago already. As an example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (released in June 2014) was the first release to no longer support installing directly on 32-bit Intel/AMD hardware (i686/x86). Already back in 2018, we had taken the decision that we will no longer be offering 32-bit binaries on new platforms or new major releases of our software.

Given today’s database workloads, we also think that 32-bit systems are simply not adequate anymore, and we already stopped building newer versions of our software for this architecture.

The demand for 32-bit downloads has also been declining steadily. A recent analysis of our download statistics revealed that only 2.3% of our total binary downloads are referring to i386 binaries. Looking at IP addresses, these downloads originated from 0.4% of the total range of addresses.

This change affects the following products:

  • Percona Server for MySQL 5.7
  • Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7
  • Percona XtraBackup 2.4
  • Percona Toolkit

We’ve updated the Percona Release Lifecycle Overview web page accordingly to reflect this change. Previously released binaries for these platforms and architectures will of course remain accessible from our repositories.

If you’re still running EL 6 or a 32-bit database or OS, we strongly recommend upgrading to a more modern platform. Our Percona Services team would be happy to help you with that!

Feb
21
2013
--

Solving RPM installation conflicts

Lately we’ve had many reports of the RPM packages for CentOS 5 (mostly) and CentOS 6 having issues when installing different combinations of our products, particularly with Percona Toolkit. Examples of bugs related to these issues are lp:1031427 and lp:1051874.

These problems arise when trying to install a package from the distribution that is linked against the version of libmysqlclient.so shipped by the distribution (libmysqlclient.so.15 for CentOS 5/libmysqlclient.so.16 for CentOS 6) and a version of Percona Server that depends on another version of libmysqlclient.so, usually more recent. Bug lp:1031427 is an example of this, and shows how the packages would conflict when trying to install libmysqlclient.so.

For example, when installing php-mysql alongside PS 5.5 in CentOS 6:


# yum -q install Percona-Server-server-55 php-mysql

Installing:
Percona-Server-server-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 15 M
php-mysql x86_64 5.3.3-14.el6_3 updates 79 k
Installing for dependencies:
Percona-Server-client-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 7.0 M
Percona-Server-shared-51 x86_64 5.1.67-rel14.3.506.rhel6 percona 2.8 M
Percona-Server-shared-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 787 k

Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================================================================================
Install 5 Package(s)

Is this ok [y/N]: y

Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so conflicts between attempted installs of Percona-Server-shared-51-5.1.67-rel14.3.506.rhel6.x86_64 and Percona-Server-shared-55-5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient_r.so conflicts between attempted installs of Percona-Server-shared-51-5.1.67-rel14.3.506.rhel6.x86_64 and Percona-Server-shared-55-5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6.x86_64

The traditional solution for this situation was to provide a special package, Percona-Server-shared-compat (modeled after upstream’s MySQL-shared-compat) which would contain ALL versions of libmysqlclient.so.* together and wouldn’t conflict. Probably some of you are familiar with this approach.


# yum -q install Percona-Server-server-55 Percona-Server-shared-compat php-mysql

Installing:
Percona-Server-server-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 15 M
Percona-Server-shared-compat x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 3.4 M
php-mysql x86_64 5.3.3-14.el6_3 updates 79 k
Installing for dependencies:
Percona-Server-client-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 7.0 M
Percona-Server-shared-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.401.rhel6 percona 787 k

Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================================================================================
Install 5 Package(s)

Notice how PS-shared-compat installs along the -shared package, providing the older libmysqlclient.so.16 required by php-mysql.

However, this has proved non-intuitive and problematic, since the shared-compat package wouldn’t get selected unless explicitely installed — and many of our users would rather have it “just work” without requiring additional knowledge of what the particular workaround was, etc..

We’re now trying a solution in which our -shared packages won’t conflict anymore at libmysqlclient.so, so we are able to install them side-by-side, modelled after the mysql-libs packages provided by CentOS/Redhat. So even if the user wants to install PS 5.5 alongside packages that depend on 5.1/5.0, the -shared packages will work together. For example installing 5.5 and postfix in CentOS:


# yum -q install Percona-Server-server-55 postfix

Installing:
Percona-Server-server-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.402.rhel5 percona-testing 19 M
postfix x86_64 2:2.3.3-6.el5 base 3.8 M
Installing for dependencies:
Percona-SQL-shared-50 x86_64 5.0.92-b23.89.rhel5 percona-testing 1.8 M
Percona-Server-client-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.402.rhel5 percona-testing 9.1 M
Percona-Server-shared-55 x86_64 5.5.29-rel29.4.402.rhel5 percona-testing 993 k

 

… and this will install without problems.

Additionally, this has the advantage of allowing an upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 without uninstalling any software that depended on the old version.


# rpm -qa | grep ^Percona
Percona-Server-client-51-5.1.67-rel14.3.507.rhel6.x86_64
Percona-Server-shared-51-5.1.67-rel14.3.507.rhel6.x86_64
Percona-Server-server-51-5.1.67-rel14.3.507.rhel6.x86_64

In this case only Percona-Server-client-51 and Percona-Server-server-51 need be removed, allowing any package that depends on Percona-Server-shared-51 (providing libmysqlclient.so.16) to remain installed. After the server and client packages are uninstalled, you can install PS 5.5 without conflict.

The current package candidates for versions 5.0.92 (which required an update), 5.1.67-14.3 and 5.5.29-29.4 can be tested from the percona-testing repository. We encourage you to try these out and send us your feedback and/or file any bugs you find.

Installation instructions for Percona Testing repositories.

We’re aiming to include these fixes in our next releases of 5.1 and 5.5. Percona Toolkit users in particular will enjoy this update since it’ll mean no more trouble when installing it from repository!

The post Solving RPM installation conflicts appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

Powered by WordPress | Theme: Aeros 2.0 by TheBuckmaker.com