CentOS AltArch SIG status

2015-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

Recently I had (from an Infra side) to start deploying KVM guests for the ppc64 and ppc64le arches, so that AltArch SIGs contributors could start bootstrapping CentOS 7 rebuild for those arches. I'll probably write a tech review about Power8 and the fact you can just use libvirt/virt-install to quickly provision new VMs on PowerKVM , but I'll do that in a separate post.

Parallel to ppc64/ppc64le, armv7hl interested some Community members, and the discussion/activity about that arch is discussed on the dedicated mailing list. It's slowly coming and some users already reported having used that on some boards (but still unsigned and no updates packages -yet- )

Last (but not least) in this AltArch list is i686 : Johnny built all packages and are already publicly available on buildlogs.centos.org , each time in parallel to the x86_64 version. It seems that respinning the ISO for that arch and last tests would be the only things to do.

If you're interested in participating in AltArch (and have special interesting a specific arch/platform), feel free to discuss that on the centos-devel list !

CentOS 7 armv7hl build in progress

2015-05-21T00:00:00+02:00

As more and more people were showing interest in CentOS on the ARM platform, we thought that it would be a good idea to start trying building CentOS 7 for that platform. Jim started with arm64/aarch64 and got an alpha build ready and installable.

On my end, I configured some armv7hl nodes, "donated" to the project by Scaleway. The first goal was to init some Plague builders to distribute the jobs on those nodes, which is now done. Then working on a "self-contained" buildroot , so that all other packages can be rebuilt only against that buildroot. So building first gcc from CentOS 7 (latest release, better arm support), then glibc, etc, etc ... That buildroot is now done and is available here.

Now the fun started (meaning that 4 armv7hl nodes are currently (re)building a bunch of SRPMS) and you can follow the status on the Arm-dev List if you're interested, or even better, if you're willing to join the party and have a look at the build logs for packages that failed to rebuild. The first target would be to have a "minimal" install working, so basically having sshd/yum working. Then try other things like GUI environment.

As plague-server required mod_python (deprecated now) we don't have any Web UI people can have a look at. But I created a "quick-and-dirty" script that gathers information from the mysql DB, and outputs that here :

Packages in the current queue
Packages in a "failed" status (with link to the log files)

The other interesting step will be to produce .img files that would work on some armv7hl nodes. So diving into uboot for Odroid C1 (just as an example) ....

I'll also try to maintain a dedicated Wiki page for the arm32 status in the following days/weeks/etc ..

Arrfab's blog - armv7hl

CentOS AltArch SIG status

CentOS 7 armv7hl build in progress