November 2023 Newsletter

• CentOS Connect will be held February 1-2 in Brussels, right before FOSDEM. Join us for two days of presentations and meetups. The CFP for both presentations and meetups is now open.
• The Distributions Devroom will happen again at FOSDEM. CentOS is part of the organizing team. The CFP is open.
• The CentOS board formally approved the Documentation SIG, co-chaired by Amy Marrich and Shaun McCance.

SIG Reports

Promo SIG

The Promo SIG is responsible for promotion and messaging around the CentOS project, both at physical events and online.

• The Promo SIG has started having weekly meetings. Everybody is welcome to join. Email sig-promo@centosproject.org for information.
• We have been revamping the newsletter to make it easier to produce and easier to consume. As part of this effort, we’ve streamlined SIG reports and started using GitLab issues to track them.
• We’re working on opening up the budget planning and spending process, inspired in large part by how Fedora handles its budget. As part of this effort, we’ve started using GitLab issues to track spending requests.
• We’ve opened up access to our social media accounts to the team. We’re now using Buffer to manage access to our accounts on Mastodon, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

NFV SIG

The CentOS NFV SIG provides a CentOS-based stack that will serve as a platform for the deployment and testing of virtual network functions (VNFs) and NFV component packages on compliant CentOS platform. The NFV SIG builds against both CentOS Stream as well as RHEL buildroots for maximal compatibility.

• Several packages were added or updated in support of the release of RDO Bobcat which was released on October 24th, 2024 based on upstream OpenStack Bobcat.
• openvswitch 3.1 and 2.17 have received frequent updates based off upstream
• openvswitch 3.2 and ovn-23.06 were added in support of RDO Bobcat and will continue to receive updates
• ovn-23.09 was released upstream, but is not yet available for packaging in NFV SIG

In the next few months, the NFV SIG will be working on automation to keep the Stream and non-Stream releases in sync. If you’d like to participate in this, please reach out on the mailing list!

Artwork SIG

The CentOS Artwork SIG exists to produce The CentOS Project Visual Identity.

• [In Progress] Website home page redesign is happening, slowly.
• [In Progress] jekyll-theme-centos theme architecture and design:
  • [Done] Update jekyll-theme-centos theme to use Bootstrap 5.3.
  • [New] Add jekyll-theme-centos-sponsors component to jekyll-theme-centos theme to manage presentation of CentOS Sponsors.
  • [Done] Update jekyll-theme-centos-sponsors documentation.
  • [Done] Update jekyll-theme-centos-base documentation.
• [ToDo] Website content re-organization under three main topics: CentOS Bits, CentOS Community and CentOS Sponsors.

Cloud SIG

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

• RDO has published the RDO Bobcat release on Oct 24th 2023 based on upstream OpenStack Bobcat. (https://lists.rdoproject.org/archives/list/dev@lists.rdoproject.org/thread/VMWRQGCPJLXKQHEKJYKBO6MWTXE4NMY6/)
• centos-release-cloud RPM contains now the GPG key of the Cloud SIG. This RPM is used by both RDO and OKD projects.
• OKD has built its packages on CBS, the repos are available at centos-release-okd-. Those are currently consumed to build SCOS (CentOS Stream CoreOS) with the okd-coreos-pipeline Tekton pipeline.
• OKD is working on layering OKD artifacts on top of SCOS (CentOS Stream CoreOS) https://github.com/okd-project/okd-coreos-pipeline/pull/46, as currently it’s built altogether. This would provides a minimal CentOS Stream CoreOS image as a base for other usecase.
• You can checkout the latest OKD/SCOS builds at https://github.com/okd-project/okd-scos/releases.
• OKD has moved to version 4.14 for stable release streams, and 4.15 for the OKD/SCOS next release stream.

Alternative Images SIG

The purpose of the Alternative Images SIG is to build and provide alternate iso images for CentOS Stream.

• Troy Dawson gave a status report at Flock / CentOS Connect
• Documentation
  • Moved completely from wiki to normal docs.
  • Created documentation to build your own image with Red Hat’s Image Builder API
• Live Image installer bug is still being worked on. Getting close to having this fixed.

Virtualization SIG

The Virt-SIG aims to deliver a user-consumable full stack for virtualization technologies that want to work with the SIG. This includes delivery, deployment, management, update and patch application (for full lifecycle management) of the baseline platform when deployed in sync with a technology curated by the Virt-SIG..

• Camilla Conte joined the SIG in July.
• Cole Robinson joined the SIG in August.
• Paolo Bonzini joined the SIG in September.
• Started merging TDX dependencies to CentOS Stream: https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-9/-/merge_requests/3044 (Camilla Conte)
• Backported and tested guest support for unaccepted memory. Waiting to be merged to CentOS Stream: https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-9/-/merge_requests/3136 (Paolo Bonzini)
• Blog post about SIG and TDX being published on November 11th.
• Automotive SIG collaboration: qemu-kvm-8.1.0-2 landed on CentOS Stream 9 ; qemu-kvm-ui-dbus-8.1.0-2 is now available within AutoSD repository
• Created docs repository at https://gitlab.com/CentOS/virt/docs/, being published at https://sigs.centos.org/virt/. Populated introduction and TDX sections.
• Backported and validated TDX support for Linux, QEMU, libvirt.