Fedora 24 Alpha for aarch64 and POWER

So Fedora 24 Alpha is out for aarch64 and POWER. Keen followers will note that we were a couple of days behind the primary architecture’s Alpha release, which hasn’t been the case for the last few Fedora cycles where we’ve generally released on the same day.

The primary reason for the delay was the Pungi Refactor. While the pungi 4 change has been massive for primary architectures for the secondary architectures it’s the single biggest change to our release process EVER! Basically we’ve thrown the lot out and started again. When I started in release engineering over 18 months ago the number one goal that was set for me can be summarised as “Be more like primary. Make the whole secondary architecture as close to primary as possible!” and we’ve been continuously moving, albeit not as fast as I would have liked, in that general direction. With the arrival of pungi 4 for Fedora 24 we’re almost at that end goal in terms of the current way we do secondary architectures.

With Fedora 24 we’re also adding a lot more release engineering focused features and functionality to the secondary architectures. We have now have full nightly composes on rawhide and branched whereas previously we’d just produce a “Everything” repo. This allows ongoing continual testing on things so it’s easier to know when things regress. On PowerPC we’ve produced qcow2 cloud images to some degree since Fedora 22 but it was a bit of a manual process. These are now fully integrated into the pungi/koji process and, like on primary produced nightly, similarly they’ll be coming to aarch64 very shortly too. In Fedora 24 we’ve added Docker base images, they’re produced nighly on branched and rawhide for PowerPC now, and will be nightly for aarch64 at the same time the qcow2 cloud images arrive. Finally aarch64 will also soon have disk images like ARMv7 on primary to enable us to easily support the new shiny aarch64 Single Board Computers (SBCs) that are _FINALLY_ becoming available for the architecture, for Fedora 24 it’ll be a bit of a hack, but with Fedora 25 both ARMv7 and aarch64 will be able to move to koji based live-media-creator image build process but I’ll outline more of that in another post.

So the pungi refactor has been big for the secondary architectures. It’s required big changes in our infrastructure which is now mostly complete, there’s a few infrastructure cleanups and final changes that are in process, these will be done in the next few weeks in the lead up to Beta. We have a single host left to migrate to ansible (YAY!!) and some final moving around of resources. We’ll be changing the way we sync content out to mirrors too which will close out one of the final deltas of the rel-eng secondary process. Overall the last few weeks have been challenging getting all the bits in place, but by the time we hit Beta it’ll all be complete! The new processes lay the foundations for the secondary architectures to add functionality quicker than ever before, and by being almost identical to primary the “onboarding” of new people to use that process, or end users be able to consume the output of the rel-eng process is easier than ever before and that makes me happy! 🙂

Preparing for FUDCon Blacksburg

Well its almost time for FUDCon Blacksburg. In fact this time next week I will have already been in Blacksburg for over a day. I’m really looking forward to the event but I know it’s going to be very busy. So what have I got planned for my time in Blacksburg? The list in fact is pretty small:

  • Fedora Board Business: We have a open board meeting planned. There will no doubt be a numbner of things to discuss and there’s already a number of things on the list.
  • Fedora ARM and Secondary Architectures in general. There’s a lot of things to discuss with ARM from koji infrastructure, building rawhide, things we need to do to progress ARM to a Primary Architecture and a lot of other things from technical to procedural and process oriented. There will also be ARM based OLPC XO 1.75s and if the rumours are true possibly even a pre production Raspberry Pi

That looks like a small list but it would be very easy to fill an entire week with those two topics on their own. If I get a spare session here and there I would also like to spend some time attending some of the Cloud SIG sessions as there’s going to be some great stuff happening there too!

My Fedora 2011 in review

Its been a some what mixed year for me personally and I certainly won’t be massively disappointed to see the end of 2011. In Fedora land the year has been completely full on!

The first major event that kicked off 2011 for me in Fedora was FUDCon Tempe which as always was brilliant. Its always awesome to catch up with a lot of Fedora Friends and to drive forward various bits of the project that are sometimes easier done face to face, whether it be in a session or at FUDPub over a beer or two! It was at Tempe that our fearless leader threw down his first challenge of the year to me… to blog about what I’m doing in the land of Fedora on a weekly basis. I didn’t quite meet this goal but have still averaged a post every fortnight.

From April a massive amount of my time was taken up with helping the Fedora ARM in particular getting Fedora 14 built for the XO 1.75 but also massively fixing packages upstream to build on ARM. With the F-14 release for the XO out I’ve been concentrating on F-15+ and later for both hard and soft floating point. The ARM project still continues to consume massive amounts of time and has basically covers a lot of the things I wanted to achieve as part of the Fedora Mobility SIG.

May saw me head off to the excellent Red Hat Summit for the second time. I was there for work and as always its very useful for the type of work I do for my $dayjob. I helped out on the Fedora booth and as always spent quite a bit of time with a number of Fedora contributors. It was there that our fearless leader convinced me that standing for The Fedora Board was also a good idea.

Fedora 15 was next up on the list, of course. A great release with gnome-3 and all sorts of other goodies. Not so good for Sugar on a Stick which had massively broken networking 🙁

October saw me attending FUDCon Milan which was a rather shorter than some FUDCons but great as always.

Fedora 16 was much more successful for Sugar on a Stick and we shipped probably the best release ever. In fact I think Fedora 16 was an awesome release.

I’m looking forward to 2012 greatly, both in the land of Fedora and in my personal life. I’m looking forward to seeing ARM progress onwards and upwards and hopefully make it to a primary architecture in the coming year. I’m not one for resolutions, I think ongoing reviews are much better so I look forward to working with all my Fedora friends throughout the coming year.

FUDCon Tempe

Well its not long before I’ll be jumping on a plane to head over the pond to Tempe, Arizona to the latest and greatest FUDCon. This will be my forth FUDCon event. I always enjoy them. Its lots of fun catching up with friends and fellow contributors who’ll no doubt become friends. There’s always one thing I really don’t like about FUDCon…. its that there’s always too many awesome topics of discussion and sessions that I want to attend but they conflict with other sessions that I want to go to 🙂

So what do I want to discuss and see discussed at FUDCon Tempe? Well as per usual there’s lots so here’s a quick bullet list:

  • Fedora Mobility: How to take it forward and who wants to achieve what, and how we all go about it. As devices get smaller and every company and their dog release tablets I think mobile devices will become more key to Fedora. It also fits in very well with a number of the Fedora Board Long Term Goals in particular I think it fits well for the help people control their content and devices and the Access from anywhere strategy.
  • Sugar, OLPC and Sugar on a Stick: there’s going to be quite a few people from various OLPC and Sugar projects in attendance. Also the awesome adamw and the Fedora QA team is going to be there so there’s plans to extend the discussions we started at FUDCon Zurich. The OLPC project is arguably the largest deployment of devices based on Fedora. The OLPC OS that runs on their XO laptops is pretty close to a vanilla Fedora release and as the last of the XO kernel patches make it upstream you can run vanilla Fedora on them with few issues.
  • Fedora ARM and secondary architectures: dgilmore, ctyler, PaulW will (I think) all be there and Fedora ARM is really starting to amp up with their awesome work! This also crosses over somewhat into OLPC and is hand in hand with Fedora Mobility. I suspect the discussions will revolve around getting Fedora 14 and rawhide building, ARMv7 + hardfp builds and ensuring ARM becomes a solid secondary arch.
  • Cloud: This sort of stuff is part of what I do for my $dayjob and it interests me greatly! I just wish I had more time to contribute to the SIG.
  • MeeGo Netbook UX: yes, this was a big FAIL for Fedora 14 and I need to blog on this. Looking much better for Fedora 15. Watch this space!
  • IPv6. There’s been some interesting posts on using IPv6 with various ISPs with that other Linux based desktop OS. Why isn’t there the same for Fedora??
  • Friends: One of the big ones of the four F’s of Fedora.
  • There’s always lots of random hallway discussions.

There’s no doubt a number of things that I’ve missed. The other thought I have is what of my Mobility tech toys to bring along. I have my laptop obviously. My atom based netbook running MeeGo Netbook UX on rawhide, my XO 1.5 running Fedora 14, my Toshiba AC100 running Fedora ARM 13 but I don’t think I can pack 4 laptop/netbook devices 😛

Fedora 14 is out!

The latest and greatest shiny release of Fedora is out. It looking to be a great release with lots of shiny new features and for the first time an officially supported Amazon EC2 AMI image. For those that want to go straight to the download click here but be sure to check out the common bugs to see if any affect you. The newly released Sugar on a Stick v4 (code name Mango Lassi) is based on this release.

Congratulations to Jared for his first release of Fedora as the new FPL and to everyone who has contributed to what looks to be another awesome release!