CentOS Hyperscale SIG Quarterly Report for 2024Q4

This report covers work that happened in 2024Q3 and 2024Q4 between July 4rd 2024 and January 7th 2025. For previous work, see the 2024Q2 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 membership has remained the same.

We welcome anybody that’s interested and willing to do work within the scope of the SIG to join and contribute. See the membership page in our user documentation 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.

systemd

We reduced the number of moving pieces in our systemd backport by standardizing on upstream systemd stable branches instead of maintaining our own forked repository. To go along with this, we refreshed the systemd release documentation. As preparation for the v256 release of systemd, we made various contributions to the Fedora systemd spec, most notably the switch to use %posttrans instead of %postun for restarting services to allow rolling out scriptlet fixes in just one release instead of two (on upgrade %postun of the old package is invoked, not %postun of the new package). To simplify testing the systemd backport, we also rebased our mkosi package to version 24.

Kernel

Spin images

No images have been produced yet, but work has been ongoing to get the Anaconda stack ready for live images. There is a remaining pull request to be merged.

Support for EROFS has been added to kiwi in preparation for Hyperscale live media, as SquashFS is deprecated in CentOS Stream 10.

Package updates

  • elfutils rebased to 0.192
  • ethtool rebased to 6.10
  • mstflint rebased to 4.30.0
  • numactl rebased to 2.0.19
  • opencsd 1.5.5 added to Hyperscale, it's used by perf on aarch64 and is a drop-in replacement for v1.2.1 in Stream 9
  • rasdaemon rebased to 0.8.1
  • erofs-utils rebased to 1.8.4
  • wayland-protocols rebased to 1.37
  • libportal rebased to 0.8.1

Release engineering updates

  • Added libportal-qt6 to AppStream and libportal-qt6-devel to CRB
  • Added libei devel packages to CRB
  • Added libdisplay-info-devel to CRB

DNF/RPM stack with CoW support

  • in CentOS 9 hyperscale, the rpm CoW codebase has been ported to 4.16.1.3-34, in line with latest CentOS package.
  • in CentOS 10 hyperscale, the package was forked from the default CentOS, which is 4.19.1.1-9, and the CoW code was ported over it.

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:fedoraproject.org Matrix room for ad-hoc communication and work coordination; this room used to be bridged to the #centos-hyperscale IRC channel, but the bridge is currently inoperative. For async discussions and announcements we generally use the centos-devel mailing list. The SIG also holds open monthly video conference sessions to promote collaboration and social interaction.

Conference talks

During the last quarter members of the CentOS Hyperscale SIG attended several conferences where they were able to share the work the SIG is doing and meet up in person:

We maintain a page tracking conference presentations around Hyperscale-related topics. You can find references there to all talks mentioned below, including video recordings where available. If you’d like to meet us in person at a future event please reach out.

Later this year we're planning to attend CentOS Connect, FOSDEM and SCaLE 22x. We'll also hold a face-to-face meetup the first day of CentOS Connect, together with the CentOS Alternative Images SIG.

Live streams

The SIG periodically does work live on Twitch from its official Twitch channel. Interested parties who want to watch and interact with us as we do work should follow us on Twitch to get notified for when we stream.

Planned work

The SIG tracks pending work as issues on our Pagure repository. Notable projects currently in flight include:

  • continuing the CentOS Stream 10 bringup
  • shipping an updated QEMU package in EPEL
  • integrate btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature

Issues for the Board

We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.

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