Calibre RHEL/CentOS 5 Roadmap

Calibre RHEL/CentOS 5 Support Overview and Roadmap

Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) and CentOS 5 Linux was deprecated (still supported but not recommended) in 2017 and 2018 and only limited support for RHEL/CentOS 5 is provided in 2019 and 2020 (enabling environment variable is required to run).

Notice of Intention to Discontinue Calibre Support on RHEL/CentOS 5

In order to allow time for platform transition planning, Calibre is providing notice that support for RHEL/CentOS version 5 series is deprecated and will be completely discontinued based upon the schedule below. With the general support for RHEL/CentOS 5 reaching end-of-life in March 2017 and new higher-performance hardware offerings requiring newer OS versions, Calibre 2016.4 is the last release that offers full support for the RHEL/CentOS 5 Operating System.

In coordination with published Red Hat dates, Calibre plans to discontinue support for the RHEL/CentOS 5 series per the following schedule:

Calibre 2016.4 (Nov 2016) – last Calibre release fully supported on RHEL/CentOS 5
Calibre 2017.1 through 2018.4 (Feb 2017 – Oct 2018) – Calibre support on RHEL/CentOS 5 deprecated. Priority shifts to new OS versions.
Red Hat: 31 March 2017 – RHEL End of Production, Phase 3 – bug and security fixes no longer available!
Calibre 2019.1 through 2020.4 (Jan 2019 – Oct 2020) – Very limited Calibre support on RHEL/CentOS 5; requires special setting to enable execution.
Red Hat: 30 November 2020—RHEL End of Extended Lifecycle Support
Calibre 2021.1 (Jan 2021) – NO RHEL/CentOS 5 support.

Flexera FlexNet no longer supports RHEL/CentOS 5 as of v11.13.1.2. Licensing is not guaranteed to work on RHEL/CentOS 5. If licensing fails on RHEL/CentOS 5, the only remedy is to upgrade the OS.

LINUX

As of the 2017.4 Calibre release, the Linux MGC_HOME is packaged into three trees, IXL, AOI and AOJ. The different executables are optimized for different Linux distributions, and only the IXL MGC_HOME tree is supported on RHEL/CentOS 5.

Calibre summary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 OS support on Linux x86-64

RHEL/CentOS 5 versions qualified on the x86-64 platforms for specific Calibre releases.

Calibre & OS versions	RHEL CentOS 5.5	RHEL CentOS 5.6/5.8	RHEL CentOS 5.10
2008 - 2013
2014 - 2015
2016
2017 - 2018
2019 - 2020		*limited* **	*limited* **
2021

	Supported
	Still supported but not recommended
**	Still supported, not recommended, enabling environment variable required
	Discontinued, no support

If a customer is experiencing any NFS or automounter issues while running older RHEL/CentOS 5 versions, we strongly recommend upgrading to RHEL/CentOS 5.10. We do not recommend and do not support RHEL/CentOS 5.9 due to an OS bug fix intended to prevent logic errors in various mathematical functions also has a side-effect of creating performance regressions for certain inputs. The performance regressions have been analyzed and the core routines optimized to improve performance in RHEL/CentOS 5.10. (Please see Red Hat BZ#861871.) RHEL/CentOS 5 versions up through 5.8 contain the math logic errors and will therefore calculate slightly different (and less correct) results compared to RHEL/CentOS 5.10.