Supported operating system versions

[Andrew Wang <an...@cloudera.com>]

Hi all,

I saw HDFS-6421 float by, which made me wonder what versions of Linux we
support. The FAQ (http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/FAQ) just says "Linux", but
clearly we need a version cut off somewhere.

I looked at a few vendor sites for the oldest supported RHEL version for
their branch-2 based distros:

Hortonworks: RHEL 5.7
Cloudera: RHEL 5.7
MapR: RHEL 6.1

Seems like Hortonworks and Cloudera would prefer if we standardized on
~RHEL 5.7+ for branch-2. Clearly there's Ubuntu, SLES, etc, but we need to
start somewhere.

Is this something we should agree on and then add to the wiki? A related
page I found concerns Java versions (
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HadoopJavaVersions), so we could add
something similar.

Thanks,
Andrew

p.s. Not saying we shouldn't fix HDFS-6421, this question about OS versions
is obviously much broader than that one JIRA.