CentOS Community newsletter, March 2020 (#2003)
Tuesday, 3, March 2020 Rich Bowen Newsletter No Comments

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

For the past several months, the focus has been on FOSDEM, as usual this time of year. Now that FOSDEM is behind us, it's time to turn our attention to the upcoming Dojo at Facebook, and Red Hat Summit. We'd love to see you at one of these events. (or both!) The call for presentations is open for the Dojo, and we're looking for presentations about anything you're doing on top of CentOS. More details below.

In this edition:

News

The CentOS team is pleased to announce that we have updated the kernel, kmod-kvdo, vdo, createrepo_c, and drpm packages in CentOS 8 Stream. These updates have already been published and are propagating out to the mirror network now.

You can read more about that in the CentOS-Devel mailing list archive.

UPDATE: Due to the change in status of Red Hat Summit, we have decided to postpone the CentOS Dojo at Facebook. Please keep checking back for updates.

 

Releases and updates

We had a fairly typical month of releases and updates:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during February:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during February:

Events

We have a full schedule of events shaping up for this year - both events that we are producing, as well as larger events at which we will have some kind of presence. Come see us:

  • FOSSAsia, March 19-21, Singapore. Details
  • CentOS Dojo at Facebook, April 24th, Menlo Park, California. Details
  • Red Hat Summit, April 27th - 29th, San Francisco, California. Details
  • Texas Linux Fest, May 1-2, Austin, Texas. Details
  • ISC HPC (Supercomputing), June 21-25, Frankfurt, Germany. (Tentative)
  • September 2020 - Dojo at ORNL/UTenn - (Tentative)
  • CentOS Dojo at CERN, October 23rd, Meyrin, Switzerland. Details

SIG Reports

The SIGs - special interest groups - are where most of the interesting stuff in CentOS happens. They are communities packaging and testing layered projects on top of CentOS, and ensuring that they work reliably.

Virtualization SIG

From the oVirt perspective:

- Preparing for oVirt 4.4.0 GA which will support execution on CentOS Linux 8 / CentOS Stream with Advanced Virtualization rebuilt from RHEL.
- Produced Advanced Virtualization builds for Virt SIG and Cloud SIG consumption
- Presented several sessions at DevConfCZ (slides available from https://devconfcz2020a.sched.com/ , video not yet available as far as I can tell) and Fosdem (presentation and videos available from https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/ ) in January 2020
- New members joined the SIG for helping with oVirt: Miguel Barroso (oVirt Networking), Danilo de Paula (Advanced Virtualization)
 
For Xen:
 
- Updated kernel 4.9.212
- Made official policy for updating default Xen versions; soon to move to Xen 4.12
- Investigating possibility of joining efforts with Xen Made Easy in maintaining kernel, packages
- Still waiting for CentOS 8 CBS
  

OpsTools SIG Quarterly Report

01 December 2019 - 29 February 2020.

This report also includes reporting for the Messaging SIG, which is marked explicitly, where it's appropriate.

Purpose
-------

Provide tools for second day operations for operators of large infrastructure.

The Messaging SIG is providing infrastructure for sending messages like RabbitMQ or Apache QPID.

The OpsTools SIG depends on deliverables of the Messaging SIG. CentOS Opstools builds were consumed by OpenStack Kolla; we would need CentOS 8 builds to move forward, or we'd loose CentOS based container images.

We are interested in getting the builds integrated in OpenStack and to finally have builds CI tested.

Contributing

As we are coming up on several Dojos, it's worth reminding you that you can step up to host or plan (or both) a dojo in your part of the world. While most of our Dojos are at research institutions (CERN, ORNL) or located alongside other major events (FOSDEM, Red Hat Summit), Dojos are intended to be local gatherings, and so we rely on you to tell us where we should run them.

If you're curious what's involved in running a Dojo, you're in luck. We've been working on a comprehensive playbook to document the various steps, so that you can pick it up and run your own event. It's not done yet, but it's getting there.

Want to run a Dojo? Get in touch with the centos-promo mailing list at https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo

And, as always have a look at the many opportunities for contribution on the 'Contribute' page on the wiki.

Request for members

Many of us have observed that many beginners want to contribute to the CentOS project but after seeing such a huge project they refrain from even starting.

We request the developers or maintainers currently working on the CentOS to create a wiki page or a simple guide on how and what to begin with or a basic tutorial with weekly tasks to facilitate new contributors.

Many people are willing to help in this if this gets initiated.

This will surely give a boost to new innovative ideas by people all around the globe brainstorming for an optimization or improvement.

Get in touch with the centos-promo mailing list at https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo