As 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!
