May 2023 Newsletter

• The next CentOS Connect will be colocated at Flock on August 2. Watch the website or social media for CFP and registration details.
• The CentOS project has started a podcast called Connections, where we talk to interesting people doing interesting things across the CentOS ecosystem. For our first episode, we talked to Fedora Community Architect Justin Flory about Red Hat Summit, Fedora, and Flock.
• Read the important notice about end dates for CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Linux 7.
• The CentOS board has approved the new ISA SIG, which will explore enabling new processor features in CentOS builds. The team will focus on x86_64, but is open to contributors working on other architectures.
• The Cloud SIG has announced the availability of the RDO build for OpenStack 2023.1 Antelope for CentOS Stream and related systems.
• Fedora ELN x86_64 builds are switching to the x86_64-v3 baseline. This will be the baseline for CentOS Stream 10 next year.
• Adam Samalik announced that CentOS Stream 8 is now ahead of RHEL 8, following the same workflow as Stream 9. This was the intended workflow, but there was transition time on the engineering processes in the 8 timeframe.

SIG Reports

Each month, we publish a rotating selection of quarterly reports from our Special Interest Groups. This month includes reports from the Hyperscale, Kmods, and Cloud SIGs.

Hyperscale SIG

The Hyperscale SIG focuses on enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling.

Read the full Hyperscale SIG report.

• All of our conference talks are collected here. Here are the recent ones:
  • Davide Cavalca presented the Hyperscale SIG update at CentOS Connect.
  • Michel Salim presented One year on: Experiences using ebranch to bring over Fedora packages to EPEL at CentOS Connect and Upstream First: Meta’s Linux Userspace, meet Linux Distributions at SCaLE 20x.
  • Alvaro Leiva Geisse and Anita Zhang hosted a systemd workshop at SCaLE 20x.
• The SIG gained 4 new members: Dalton Miner, Oleg Obleukhov, Vadim Fedorenko, and Alexander Bulimov.
• We hosted our second face to face Hypercale meetup at CentOS Connect/FOSDEM 2023. You can catch the notes here.
• We’ve enhanced our systemd Hyperscale documentation with additional instructions for release testing and SELinux policy updates.
• Our container build pipeline is fully automated, and container images are built on the CentOS OpenShift CI/CD infrastructure and published weekly on Quay.
• We have worked with CPE to enable the ability to use KIWI to build operating system images through CBS.
• All packages coming from Hyperscale will have a “CentOS Hyperscale SIG” vendor tag. This both makes provenance clear, and allows one to set allow_vendor_change=False in DNF to avoid SIG packages being replaced by stock CentOS packages with higher NEVRAs.
• An optimized version of zlib is in our “hyperscale-intel” repository. This version is identical to the one in CentOS Stream, but with two alternative hash implementations to provide fast and high-quality hash function on systems supporting SSE4.2 and AVX2 instructions.
• The latest kernel version in the Hyperscale SIG is kernel-5.14.0-76.hs2.hsx for CentOS Stream 8 and kernel-5.14.0-258.hs3.hsx.el9 for CentOS Stream 9.
• Package systemd has been updated to version 252.4.
• Package squashfs-tools has been updated to version 4.5.1.
• Package valgrind has been updated to version 3.20.0.
• Package grep has been updated to version 3.9.
• Package libslirp has been updated to version 4.4.0.

Kmods SIG

The Kmods SIG focuses on packaging and maintaining kernel modules for CentOS Stream and Enterprise Linux.

• No SIG members have been added since last report. We welcome anybody that’s interested and willing to do work within the scope of the SIG to join and contribute.
• A talk about the current status of the Kmods SIG and its used automation has been given at the CentOS Connect in Brussels, Belgium. A recording is available on YouTube.
• Fixed automation for Stream 8. This issue was caused by the recent modification of the Stream 8 workflow.

Cloud SIG

Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based Private cloud infrastructure applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS Stream.

General:

• A new RPM containing the CentOS Cloud SIG RPM GPG pubkey has been created: centos-release-cloud. This package is required by the also newly created centos-release-okd RPM, and going forward will also be required by the centos-release-openstack RPM that has so far contained the key.

RDO:

• CloudSIG has published the RDO Antelope release on Apr 18th based on upstream OpenStack Antelope. (https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2023-April/142884.html)
• RDO is currently investigating the use of RPMs from the RDO CloudSiG repos to deploy them utilizing OpenStack-Ansible. The reason for this effort is to compensate for the retirement of the TripleO project as a deployment tool.

OKD:

• CloudSIG has built and published the cri-o and openshift-clients RPMs on CBS. Currently the builds aren’t automated, but they will be in the future using packit.dev.
• This is a big step towards producing CentOS Stream CoreOS (aka SCOS) with purely CentOS-sourced RPMs.
• Furthermore, new releases of OKD/SCOS were published, with the latest ones moving the stable release stream to version 4.13 and the .next release stream to version 4.14 (https://github.com/okd-project/okd-scos/releases)

Documentation:

• The documentation of Cloud SIG is now available at https://sigs.centos.org/cloud/
• The mkdocs based repository contains the source and is populated on https://pagure.io/centos-sig-cloud/documentation