CY2026 Pre-Siggraph Update

[Francois Chardavoine]

Hello VFX Platform friends & family again!

As we get closer to Siggraph a reminder that:

• We have a Birds of Feather (BOF) session at Siggraph as usual: this is Tuesday morning at 9:00AM (bring coffee!)
• While the BOF is unfortunately not available to join remotely, we'll send out notes following any in-person discussion, and request feedback.
• We'll finalize the CY26 platform the first week of September.

Based on both community and vendor, we've updated the current CY26 draft with a few significant items:

• glibc 2.28: While we had initially suggested glibc 2.34, this would have forced an EL9 platform upgrade for everyone, and it seems there are still a meaningful number of studios still on EL8, and no platform-specific reason to force an upgrade has an emerged so we're staying steady on 2.28.
• Numpy 2.3: it turns out python 3.13 required at least numpy 2.1, so we bumped to the latest 2.3 to benefit from any recent updates.
• OCIO 2.5.x: request was made to go to the latest version which will be released around Sept 30th.
• OpenSubdiv 3.7.x: request was also made to move to the latest, which will only be released towards the end of October.

You can find the current platform draft: HERE.

Please let us know if you have any feedback or concerns about these latest changes compared to our earliest guidance, in particular when it comes to some of the later-releasing librairies like OCIO and OpenSubdiv.

Also if you're not attending Siigraph but would like us to raise any questions or suggestions for the in-person group, we're happy to raise any topics for discussion in the room! Either way don't hesitate to provide feedback.

Francois.

[Neal Gompa]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2025 at 11:59 PM Francois Chardavoine
<francois.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello VFX Platform friends & family again!
>
> As we get closer to Siggraph a reminder that:
>
> We have a Birds of Feather (BOF) session at Siggraph as usual: this is Tuesday morning at 9:00AM (bring coffee!)
> While the BOF is unfortunately not available to join remotely, we'll send out notes following any in-person discussion, and request feedback.
> We'll finalize the CY26 platform the first week of September.
>
>
> Based on both community and vendor, we've updated the current CY26 draft with a few significant items:
>
> glibc 2.28: While we had initially suggested glibc 2.34, this would have forced an EL9 platform upgrade for everyone, and it seems there are still a meaningful number of studios still on EL8, and no platform-specific reason to force an upgrade has an emerged so we're staying steady on 2.28.

From my perspective as a community person engaging to help with fixes
and improvements for the VFX community, the EL8 platform is basically
frozen at this point. It's at its so-called "zombie period" and we
cannot really do anything about issues there. I had hoped that a
suggestion of glibc 2.34 would encourage people to move to EL9 sooner
rather than later.



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

[Deke Kincaid]

@Neal: Major change like this require preferably more than one calendar year before doing it.  Software vendors need to change entire build chains for a package they are already far into developing, closing in on alpha and studios have huge lifts for Systems and DevOps to plan for a move such as this. 

That all being said if we do want to push for this it would to be good to telegraph dropping el8 for 2027 now.

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[Mike Rochefort]

On Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:52:46 -0400 Deke Kincaid <dekek...@gmail.com> wrote:

> That all being said if we do want to push for this it would to be good to telegraph dropping el8 for 2027 now.

I would strongly push for this as well. Just bear in mind that May/June 2027 is when RHEL 9 enters its maintenance support phase. It will only be Red Hat rated Important and Critical bug and security fixes from then on. If people have any feature requests for changes or additions to the RHEL 9 platform, they need to get them in ASAP.

It's also a good policy to encourage X+1 runtime support, so I would suggest evaluating current applications under XWayland on deskside systems and starting conversations with your remote desktop solution provider about Wayland support if you have not yet. For Qt, if the app's version matches the system, you might be able to force a true Wayland session via QT_QPA_PLATFORM. If there are general dependencies missing in RHEL 10 we can start working as a community on getting those into CRB, EPEL, or the core distribution well in advance of actual adoption.

Cheers,

Mike