This report covers work that happened between July 2nd and October 1st. For previous work, see the 2021Q2 report.
Purpose
The Hyperscale SIG focuses on enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling.
Membership update
Since the last update, the SIG gained three new members (Chris Murphy, Omar Sandoval and Benjamin Kircher).
We welcome anybody that’s interested and willing to do work within the scope of the SIG to join and contribute. See the membership section on the wiki for the current members list and how to join.
Releases and Packages
Unless otherwise specified, packages are available in our main repository, which can be enabled with dnf install centos-hyperscale-release. Please report any issues with these packages on our package-bugs tracker.
Documentation
In addition to the wiki, we now have a set of user documentation available on sigs.centos.org. This is still a work in progress, and we’d welcome feedback and any contributions.
systemd
Our most recent backport of systemd is version 249 based on the Fedora packaging. This release includes improvements and new features across all of the various systemd daemons and tools. Our latest version also backports upstream patches to support additional systemd link file configurations, such as those for for RX/TX coalescing and knobs for NIC features related to hardware acceleration.
Following Fedora’s lead, we’ve also split systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved into separate subpackages. Both are included as optional packages when installing or upgrading systemd.
btrfs-progs
We have updated our btrfs-progs package to v5.13.1 and fixed a bug in our patch disabling RAID 5/6 in btrfs balance.
LLVM
We used to ship a non-modular version of the LLVM 12 compiler suite. This has since become part of CentOS Stream 8 proper, so we have retired our build as it is no longer needed.
DNF/RPM stack with CoW support
We have rebased the Copy-on-Write packaging stack in the experimental repository to match the latest updates that landed in CentOS Steam 8 proper.
PackageKit
We now ship a patched version of PackageKit that fixes an issue in which PackageKit could not properly load CentOS repositories because CentOS uses non-standard DNF variables for repository URLs. This issue was reported over a year ago with a fix included, but since resolution had not occurred and we needed it for the Hyperscale spin, we have shipped the fix while we wait for the maintainer to resolve the issue.
kpatch
We have updated kpatch to 0.9.4, which allowed us to drop a number of patches that now carried upstream. Among other things, this new release includes support for CONFIG_PRINTK_INDEX.
Kernel
We’re currently using the 5.12 kernel based on our kernel-ark artifacts. Our plan is to rebase onto the same 5.14 version that is currently in CentOS Stream 9 and tracking that going forward.
aarch64
We intend on supporting aarch64 as an architecture for the SIG. Right now just under half the packages are rebuilt. Our kernel is in progress but notably missing from the aarch64 builds.
Live media
We released a refreshed set of GNOME and KDE Plasma Workstation media on October 1, which includes all the work that happened in the Hyperscale SIG since the last release at the end of July. Information and links to the media are available on the SIG website.
Health and Activity
The SIG continues to maintain a healthy development pace.
Meetings
The SIG holds regular bi-weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 16:00 UTC. Meetings are logged and the minutes for past meetings are available.
The SIG uses the #centos-hyperscale IRC channel for ad-hoc communication and work coordination, and the centos-devel mailing list for async discussions and announcements. The SIG also holds open monthly video conference sessions to promote collaboration and social interaction.
Conference talks
We’ll be presenting an update on SIG activites at CentOS Dojo, October 2021.
Planned work
The SIG tracks pending work as issues on our Pagure repository. Notable projects currently in flight include:
- using CBS to build our spin images
- shipping an updated QEMU package in EPEL
- integrate btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature
- setup a continuous build pipeline for the container image on the CentOS CI infrastructure
- build a set of Hyperscale-enabled Cloud images
Issues for the Board
We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.