[Starlingx-discuss] Centos Distro Direction

Wed Dec 5 19:07:52 UTC 2018

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 11:48 AM Cordoba Malibran, Erich
<erich.cordoba.malibran at intel.com> wrote:
>
> BTW, I created this story to update the installer from CentOS 7.4 to
> CentOS 7.6, in case anyone wants to participate.
>
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2004516
>

Thanks for making this  Erich , this is a topic that we check on last
week meeting and I had the AR to send the mail about the need of 7.6
installers instead of 7.4 . I am happy to see you share my point :)
and take the initiative to create the story ( good team work )

Now to clarify the other point of why Erich create the sotory with
this justification :

The installer is using CentOS 7.4 files, the upgrade into 7.6 is needed.

if we read the document of
https://git.starlingx.io/cgit/stx-metal/tree/installer/initrd/README
we can see

There are three prebuilt files that we can update when we need to make changes
to the installer:
- vmlinuz - The kernel
- initrd.img - Initial initrd loaded when the installer boots. Has kernel
  modules, etc, and loads the squashfs.img
- squashfs.img - Provides the rootfs for the installer, which includes
  components like anaconda

When we update the kernel and kernel modules for the installer, we
need to update the initrd.img. This is a manual procedure currently
and must be done. The initrd is an initial root file system that is
mounted prior to when the real root file system is available. The
initrd is bound to the kernel and loaded as part of the kernel boot
procedure. The kernel then mounts this initrd as part of the two-stage
boot process to load the modules to make the real file systems
available and get at the real root file system. If we don't do this
the symbols will not link correctly [0]

The initrd contains a minimal set of directories and executables to
achieve this, such as the insmodtool to install kernel modules into
the kernel. My concern las t build meeting was that by using
initrd.img wih modules linked to kernel of centos 7.5 and latter on
boot installer try to load kernel of centos 7.6 it might gave us some
problems hard to debug, it might be clean to use centos 7.6 with its
own installer

[0] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-initrd/index.html

Regards

Victor Rodriguez

> -Erich
>
> On Tue, 2018-12-04 at 08:42 +0000, Lin, Shuicheng wrote:
> > It seems just rpm package is released, but srpm is not released yet.
> > I will keep check it recently.
> >
> > Best Regards
> > Shuicheng
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Saul Wold [mailto:sgw at linux.intel.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 4, 2018 1:03 AM
> > To: Xie, Cindy <cindy.xie at intel.com>; starlingx-discuss at lists.starlin
> > gx.io
> > Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] Centos Distro Direction
> >
> >
> >
> > On 12/3/18 7:43 AM, Xie, Cindy wrote:
> > > Seems like that CentOS 7 just announced 1810 release today (guess
> > > this is 7.6):
> > > >
> >
> > https://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7.1810?highlight=%
> > 28%28Manuals%7CReleaseNotes%7CCentOS7.1810%29%29
> > >
> >
> > Yup, timing is!
> >
> > Cindy, can you please put this on the agenda for the next non-
> > openstack Distro meeting.
> >
> > We also have a topic for the TSC (thanks BruceJ) the following
> > morning, TSC members may want to start weighing in here regarding my
> > initial proposal below, which we can talk more about on Thursday.
> >
> >
> > Thanks
> >     Sau!
> >
> >
> > > thx. - cindy
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Saul Wold [mailto:sgw at linux.intel.com]
> > > Sent: Saturday, December 1, 2018 7:49 AM
> > > To: starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io
> > > Subject: [Starlingx-discuss] Centos Distro Direction
> > >
> > >
> > > Folks,
> > >
> > > As we move forward into the spring release (Stein based), we will
> > > also
> > > be dealing with another CentOS update.  RHEL has already released
> > > the
> > > 7.6 Update on Oct 30th, typically we should expect the CentOS 7.6
> > > update shortl, about 30 days after RHEL releases.
> > >
> > > We should do the 7.6 Update as we did the 7.5 Update on a feature
> > > branch, it took about 2 months last time (including initial setup,
> > > rebasing, and de-fuzzing), I expect it will be shorter this time
> > > based on our past learning.
> > >
> > > We should start out with creating the feature branches (I will work
> > > with Dean on this) for stx-integ, stx-root, stx-tools, and stx-
> > > upstream repos. When we start the work, we need to remember to
> > > rebase the feature branches regularly and check for patch fuzzing
> > > issues.
> > >
> > > Cindy, can you please put this on your agenda for the next Non-
> > > Openstack Distro meeting.
> > >
> > > While on the topic of Cento Distro updates, many of you may have
> > > heard
> > > that RHEL 8 Beta was announced on Nov 14 [0], while this is not a
> > > CentOS release we should start thinking about that upgrade as it
> > > will
> > > be a larger effort as it includes the 4.18 kernel (alas not the
> > > 4.19
> > > LTS
> > > kernel) along with many other upgrades.  We should start a feature
> > > branch for CentOS 8 as well to do the updates, This will help
> > > reduce
> > > some of the patch load from the backported patches.  Since we
> > > don't
> > > know exactly when CentOS 8 will be available this should be a
> > > Train-based release target (Fall 2019) (at the earliest)
> > >
> > > [0]
> > > https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving
> > > -pr
> > > esent-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > >     Sau!
> > >
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> > > s
> > >
> >
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