CentOS install on nanopi vs long term support?

[scaramouche]

Hello there!

I would like to tell first that I'm totally new with CentOS. I have some experience mainly with ubuntu (desktop & server) and few other debian style distro.
I heard about centOS while searching for a very long term support linux to setup a remote small server where I mainly have ssh access.
I wish to limit or avoid any operation like distro full upgrade to a new version too often.
So an OS with security updates only, automatic or by ssh, during a lot of years would be perfect.

CentOS seems to propose pretty long support: I have seen 'til 2029 for CentOS 8 which is far better to other distro I looked.

The target server will be a small machine, it will manage a weather station upload data by ftp and maintenance will be done by SSH.
I may either use a very small x86 device if I find one suitable, but it may likely be a SBC (single board computer).
In this case, I was thinking about a nanopi because of low price & size (and included emmc instead of sdcard).

I found this link which, as far as I understand, show that some people put "nanopi" and "centOS" in the same page, which is a good starting point

As I am new with centOS world, I have a couple of questions:
- Does it sounds reasonnable to expect support 'til 2029 with arm hardware ? or this long term support is focused on more regular x86 hardware ?
- This link I mentionned before: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterest ... rch/armhfp, it says this:

If your device is based on an AllWinner chipset, you should also check https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort so you know what to expect.

Well, I followed the link, but I'm not sure to understand this warning....it there any trouble to expect with allwinner devices ?

- If using centOS for such application seems not appropriate, ideas are welcome

Thanks!

[TrevorH]

There is no upgrade, automatic or not, between CentOS major versions. So if you install CentOS 8 it will not upgrade to 9 (if and when that comes out).

You should however regularly run yum update as that's how security updates are delivered. Approximately every 6 months there is what is known as a new point release - e.g. 7.8 just came out. Those could potentially rebase some packages of either lesser importance or rebase ones that need to change regularly like firefox where backporting individual fixes to the codebase would be impractical. You do need to update to these are once a new point release comes out, there are no more fixes to the older ones.

For arm machines everything except the kernel and arm specific packages will be the same versions as the x86_64 ones. The kernel has to be either a mainline one or one from the rpi foundation so this changes sometimes, though as infrequently as possible.

[scaramouche]

And and thank you for your reply!

Does it sounds ok to perform those new point release remotly by SSH ? (considering it should be a simple system, not a complex server).

[TrevorH]

Yes, it's ok to update via ssh but if your connection is prone to disconnects then you should use screen or tmux to make sure that the yum update is not interrupted.

[scaramouche]

Connexion is usually good, but I guess I can launch the update in background so an ssh disconnection should be ok.
I mean like yum update & (or something similar)

Thanks for kind support, I will give a try as soon as I have a hardware to install it