RED Rocket update...

[JonathanF]

No ETA yet. Driver/kernel variations between all the distros and versions make linux a much slower development processes.

With that in mind, is there a distro that's compatible with the various common linux apps that would make you happy as a first distro? We've got Ubuntu 9.04 on the machines we use for grading, but Fedora would be fine as well. These boxes really only run one app so...

If targeting a single distro in the short term would make your life easier I'm all for it. Making the change on our end would be trivial compared to migrating these machines to another platform where we don't have any of our own tools built.

[Martin Tlaskal]

If targeting a single distro in the short term would make your life easier I'm all for it. Making the change on our end would be trivial compared to migrating these machines to another platform where we don't have any of our own tools built.

Not true of stuff like Baselight, though - our base distro (Centos 5.2) and specific kernel version etc need to be carefully chosen to get solid drivers for 10gE cards, ADIC SAN drivers, Audio cards, DVS I/O cards etc. It's quite a task just to pick one which gets closest, which is why we have our own distro (FLOS), because no one off the shelf one does the specific job we need. It's likely da Vinci with Resolve are in a similar situation.

I'm guessing RED will sort it in a similar way to nVidia with their binary drivers - have a binary chunk with the majority of the code and compile a shim to interface to each supported kernel variant as part of installation process. This would work well, but it all takes time to get right.

-Martin

[JonathanF]

Not true of stuff like Baselight, though - our base distro (Centos 5.2) and specific kernel version etc need to be carefully chosen to get solid drivers for 10gE cards, ADIC SAN drivers, Audio cards, DVS I/O cards etc. It's quite a task just to pick one which gets closest, which is why we have our own distro (FLOS), because no one off the shelf one does the specific job we need. It's likely da Vinci with Resolve are in a similar situation.

I'm guessing RED will sort it in a similar way to nVidia with their binary drivers - have a binary chunk with the majority of the code and compile a shim to interface to each supported kernel variant as part of installation process. This would work well, but it all takes time to get right.

-Martin

I'm saying it would be trivial for us.

On our side we need stornext drivers and we can have them built for us by the vendor with a little effort. We've had no issues with DVS cards on numerous distros including RHEL (which means Cent should be a piece of cake), Fedora and even Ubuntu. We have never had a problem with 10g drivers and we've used Cisco, Extreme and other GBIC's on the switch side and Myricom, Intel and others on the card side without issue. Most 10G cards have had kernel drivers in all the major distros for a VERY long time. Specifying a specific nVidia driver is no big issue as a quick jump to run level 3 from 5 and running nVidia's install script solves that issue on most every distribution.

BaseLight may have VERY unique and specific requirements and supporting your product may have made a unique distro a sensible choice, but I've had Lustre running on a number of distros without any issue and there are other apps like Piranha that will run on Cent, RHEL, Fedora and Ubuntu without any problem whatsoever. My suspicion is that these make up the vast majority of people who are waiting for Linux SDK rocket support.

I'm not saying that Baselight isn't an important tool to have support for in the long run, but if getting support on Fedora or RHEL (CENT), which are by a wide margin the most used in the film industry, can be done more quickly than a more generic SDK that will work on a larger number of distros, then we're all for it.

Here we have puppet configurations for numerous Fedora and two Ubuntu distros already so making a switch would be a 1 day thing if something went wrong on our side. We have a couple proprietary apps we'd need to possibly build, but that is also trivial.

So, for "US" here at this shop, we don't care too much what (non-proprietary) Distro is supported first, so long as we can get up to date 64 bit nVidia drivers for it.

For you at Filmlight the issue may be a lot more complicated. But I suspect that there are a lot more Lustre sites out there than Baselight sites. All the distros we've seen Lustre on may not be 'officially' supported, but there have never been any issues, so for a short period of time I see no issue either making a brief switch (or a second boot drive) if we can get Rocket support faster on one specific (non proprietary) distro.

[Martin Tlaskal]

Hi Jonathan,

Wasn't trying to turn this into Baselight vs Lustre or anything else. I was just pointing out that RED might well have to hit a number of different distros (eg Centos & Ubunto) and engineering a solution which allows them to elegantly support them all takes longer than just picking one.

Regards,

-Martin

[JonathanF]

Hi Jonathan,

Wasn't trying to turn this into Baselight vs Lustre or anything else. I was just pointing out that RED might well have to hit a number of different distros (eg Centos & Ubunto) and engineering a solution which allows them to elegantly support them all takes longer than just picking one.

Regards,

-Martin

No worries Martin, I've heard only good things about BaseLight so don't take it wrong, I am just going to be real happy when we get to the point where we have the ability to conform in the DI suite and be interactive with the r3d files in the same way editorial is with the ProRes files.

When FCP can read the R3D data and get it to graphics in RT it will be a happy day as our dependence on many tens of TB of disk will simply evaporate.

We've also been really excited to have the ability to grade directly with the camera source since the Rocket announcement, but the wait has made for a real test of patience as all our post (except editorial) is Linux based.