It’s hard to believe that this wraps up our first year of quarterly platform updates.  Thank you for making this a great first year.  Today’s update talks about the planned Minimum Supported CPU list, OpenSSL 3.0 for AIX reaching GA, and a bit more.  We’ll be back for 2024!

This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap. 

With that said, on to the update…

 

InterSystems IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

 

Minimum Supported CPU Models

We’ve recently announced that InterSystems IRIS will start to have minimum required CPU functionality for Intel/AMD-based systems.  This allows IRIS to rely on certain CPU instruction extensions, such as AVX, that will result in significantly better performance of certain operations.

This change will take effect with IRIS 2024.1 and the minimum CPUs will be reviewed on an annual basis thereafter.  For more information, please see my InterSystems IRIS Minimum Supported CPU Models developer community post.

 

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Recent Changes
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for RHEL 9.2 & 8.8 on IRIS 2023.1. “Minor OS version certification” is a new process that is intended to provide additional security that a minor OS update didn’t break anything obvious and indeed both RHEL 9.2 & 8.8 passed our tests.
• Upcoming Changes
  • RHEL 9.3 was released on November 7 and RHEL 8.9 is expected to be released shortly.  InterSystems is scheduling performing Minor OS Certification for these platforms in the near future.
• Further reading: RHEL Release Page

 

Ubuntu

• Recent Changes
  • Ubuntu released 22.04.2 LTS & 20.04.6 LTS in February and March, respectively.  InterSystems has completed performing additional testing of IRIS on 22.04.02 LTS through Minor OS version certification.
• Upcoming Changes
  • The next major update of Ubuntu is 24.04 is on-schedule for April, 2024
• Further Reading: Ubuntu Releases Page

 

 

SUSE Linux

• Recent Changes
  • InterSystems has deprecated support for the VxFS filesystem.  I’m unaware of any customers still using VxFS, but if you are, please upgrade to a XFS or one of our other supported filesystems.
• Upcoming Changes
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5 was released June 20, 2023.  SP5 includes Linux Kernel 5.14.21, OpenSSL 3.0.8, and Python 3.11.  We’re currently working on Minor OS certification.
• Previous Updates
  • General Support from SUSE for Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 came to an end on 12/31/2022, but extended security support will continue until December, 2025.

Further Reading: SUSE lifecycle

 

 

Oracle Linux

• Upcoming Changes
  • Oracle surprised us by releasing Oracle Linux 9.2 right around the same time as RHEL 9.2.  We’re currently starting Minor OS certification.
• Further Reading: Oracle Linux Support Policy

 

 

Microsoft Windows

• Previous Changes
  • Windows Server 2012 has reached its end of extended support.  IRIS 2023.1 is the last release to support the OS.
• Further Reading: Microsoft Lifecycle

 

 

AIX

• Upcoming Changes
  • IRIS 2023.3 adds support for OpenSSL 3.0 for both AIX 7.2 & 7.3.  OpenSSL 3.0 is a significant improvement in overall security when compared with OpenSSL 1.0.
  • Minor OS Certification has been completed for AIX 7.2 TL5-04 and TL5-05 on IRIS 2023.1.
• Further Reading: AIX Lifecycle

 

 

Containers

• Upcoming Changes
  • An early warning that we are planning to change the base container image from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 with IRIS 2024.2
  • We will soon begin regular updates of IRIS containers containing patches to the base container image and third-party dependencies.  The new container labeling (below) should make picking up these updates something you don’t even need to think about.
• Previous Updates
  • From IRIS 2023.2 onward, IRIS containers will only be tagged with the year and release, such as “2023.2” instead of the full build numbers we’ve been using in the past.  This way, your application can, by default, pick up the latest maintenance build of your release.
  • We’ve also added “latest-em” and “latest-cd” tags for the most recent extended maintenance and continuous distribution IRIS release.  These are good for demos, examples, and development environments.
  • We have started to tag the preview containers with “-preview” so that it’s clear which container is the most recent GA release versus a preview of an upcoming release.

 

InterSystems IRIS Development Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

MacOS

• Recent Changes
  • We’ve added support for MacOS 13 in IRIS 2023.1
• Upcoming Changes
  • Apple has released MacOS 14 with IRIS support to follow, likely in IRIS 2024.1

CentOS

• IRIS 2023.2 is the last release that supports CentOS as a development platform.
• Red Hat has been running a developer program for a few years now, which gives developers access to free licenses for non-production environments.

 

 

InterSystems Components

• InterSystems System Alerting & Monitoring (SAM) has been deprecated.
  • The monitor API, which includes the Open Metrics compatible endpoint, is not impacted by this change.

 

 

Caché & Ensemble Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

• Previous Updates
  • Cache 2018.1.7 adds support for Windows 11

 

InterSystems Supported Platforms Documentation

The InterSystems Supported Platforms documentation is the definitive source information on supported technologies.

• IRIS 2023.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2022.1 Supported Server Platforms
• IRIS 2021.1 Supported Server Platforms
• Caché & Ensemble 2018.1.7 Supported Server Platforms

 

… and that’s all folks.  Again, if there’s something more that you’d like to know about, please let us know.