Bro Roadmap and Linux Distro Compatibility

Zeek
1

I'm about to build a couple more worker nodes and it got me wondering whether I should migrate to a newer Linux distro. My current cluster is running on RHEL 6.x, but over the past couple years I've noticed changes to Bro that temporarily required installing newer versions of CMake than RHEL 6.x originally supported. RHEL 6.x eventually broke the mold of not breaking binary compatibility around RHEL 6.6 and moved to a newer CMake which made the RHEL packaged CMake Bro compatible once again. As such I'm wondering if there is anything in the pipeline that would break compatibility a properly updated RHEL 6.x/Centos6.x. I'd rather not maintain separate versions of libraries to build Bro if possible. We're technically a RHEL shop, so I'd probably be looking at RHEL7.x, but I could look at another distro that is more aggressive with running newer kernels and software libraries if necessary. Thoughts?

~Gary

2

Yes, you should for Bro 2.5. I suppose you will be able to disable broker at config time and maybe still compile, but the RHEL 6 compiler doesn’t support all of Bro’s code or its dependencies.

3

Are we just talking C++11 support, which RHEL 7 supports (current git master compiles as long as you install CAF), or something where I'll want to jump to something with a 4.x kernel and C++14 support, say Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Fedora etc? RHEL 7 appears to have CMake 2.8.11 and GCC 4.8.5. The latter supports C++11, but I don't believe it supports anything newer. At one point I thought I saw talk of wanting to move to C++14 on the dev list.

~Gary

4

I am just talking about C++11 support