This week sees the completion of LCFG-level support for SL7.9. There is also a range of small improvements for the Ubuntu platform. Here are the full details…

SL7.9

LCFG-level support for the 9th minor release of Scientific Linux 7 is now complete. The main changes for SL7.9 this week are the provision of some locally patched packages and the update to the fastbugs version of glibc to resolve issues with using CUDA. See the Redhat release notes for full details of the upstream changes. Note that there is currently no support for SL7.9 at the DICE level so it’s not yet part of our weekly testing regime.

NFS client configuration

The new nfsconfig component has been enabled on DICE machines. This means that after the stable release the NFS client configuration will be changed to disable the gssproxy daemon.

GPG agent on Ubuntu

On a standard Ubuntu desktop machine the gpg-agent service will be started for each user at login time. This doesn’t work correctly for users with AFS home directories, and as it is seemingly not possible to fix the relevant systemd services it is now disabled by default on DICE machines. Any user needing to use gpg-agent will need to manually start it, details are provided on computing.help.

Minimal Python installs.

An attempt has been made to support a minimal Python install on DICE machines. By default we include a large collection of Scientific Python modules which are not always required on servers and which have quite a lot of dependencies. To switch to a more minimalist Python install specify the DICE_OPTIONS_PYTHON_MINIMAL macro at the top of an LCFG profile.

Ubuntu networking and VirtualBox

On Ubuntu the network component uses netplan to configure networking. Basic support for the VirtualBox network devices has been added for LCFG-managed VMs.

remctl and Systemd

It appears that when using Systemd to manage a remctl service the daemon needs to be restarted for any configuration changes. Support has been added to the LCFG remctl component in version 0.2.0. This week sees the introduction of the new (version 4) schema, next week the component itself will be updated.

lcfg-skeleton

The LCFG build tools provide an lcfg-skeleton tool for creating new projects. This has now been ported to Ubuntu and had various improvements to fix long-standing issues and add some new features (e.g. support for file-based components). See the docs on how it works.

aptly

The LCFG component for the aptly repository management tool has gained support for specifying the -force-overwrite option for mirrors of upstream projects. This is occasionally necessary as some projects update packages in-place without changing version or release numbers.

Test kernels

The INF_TEST kernel for Ubuntu has been updated to 5.4.0-72.80 and for SL7 has been updated to 3.10.0-1160.24.1.

New package options

Ubuntu has gained two new package options:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_GIT_SVN – subversion support for git
• LCFG_OPTIONS_CGCONFIG – various software for configuring Linux cgroups

These can be enabled by adding the option name to the profile.pkgcppopts resource, for example:

!profile.pkgcppopts mADD(LCFG_OPTIONS_GIT_SVN)

Weekly Changes – 26/04/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0