On 11/08/2017 06:25 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote:
> On 11/07/2017 06:22 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 8:43 PM, ToddAndMargo <[log in to unmask]> 
>> wrote:
>
>>> And you know the Cxxx series of chipsets have been around
>>> for a while now.  Just not long enough to be out of
>>> production at which point it will appear on Red Hat
>>> compatibility list.
>>
>> Nonsense. Our friends over at Red Hat are continuously supporting
>> leading edge *server* hardware. 
>
> Niko!  The C236 chipset *IS* a server grade chipset!
> And it has been around for a long time.  No doubt Red Hat
> will eventually support it in about five years, which is
> typical of them and useless to me.
>

According to SuperMicro's support matrix for their C236 motherboards at 
http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/OS/C236.cfm most of their 
C236 motherboards are supported, with some caveats, by RHEL7 (and thus 
CentOS or SL). So the C236 chipset itself is supported by EL7, and has 
been for a while.

But it just so happens that the particular C236-chipset board you used, 
the X11SAE-M, is apparently supported by SuperMicro for EL 7.1, but not 
later.  Now, others with a C236, such as the X11SAT and X11SAT-F, list 
support for 7.2 and 7.3 (the chart hasn't been updated for 7.4).  So you 
bought a motherboard that, for EL7.4, is not supported with that OS by 
SUPERMICRO.  Not Red Hat, but SuperMicro, the manufacturer.  To be 
blunt, but not intended to be harsh, if you want to use EL, do you 
homework and buy a supported board.  (Google-fu: search for the string 
'C236 supermicro support matrix' and this chart is third on the list, 
front page).

I personally have not had that much problem using newer software in 
CentOS 7, thanks to the Software Collections concept and repositories.  
A few things are older, but the latest Chrome works fine, the latest ESR 
Firefox and Thunderbird both work fine, etc. The kernel continues to get 
new hardware drivers backported to it, and it has been pretty stable for 
me (I'm having an issue at the moment with the nVidia binary drivers 
packaged by ELrepo, but that's not a Red Hat thing).

SuperMicro typically has great support for all things Red Hat, but this 
is one of those cases where it just isn't supported; if they could 
support it they would (they being SuperMicro, not Red Hat, since 
SuperMicro has the resources to do that support).  Safer bet is buying a 
Dell, HP, or other server that has as one of its options Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux; Dell especially is very good about this.