Weekly Changes – 14/06/2021
A very large set of differences this week, mostly related to the introduction of DICE support for SL7.9. There is also lots of housekeeping work to improve maintainability of the headers. Here are the full details…
SL7.9
This week sees lots of changes to the DICE headers and package lists to add support for the 9th minor release of SL7. This is expected to be the final minor release for this platform, it will continue to be supported by Redhat in a “maintenance phase” until 30 June 2024. Currently this can be tested on machines following the develop release by defining the DICE_TRY_SL79 macro at the top of the LCFG profile. Fairly soon this will be the default for all machines on the develop release, to hold a machine back from receiving the update you can define a DICE_STICK_WITH_SL78 macro at the top of the LCFG profile. It is expected that all DICE SL7 machines will be upgraded to SL7.9 before the start of Semester 1 in September. See the Redhat Release Notes for full details.
Kernel
The INF kernel version for SL7.9 has been updated to 3.10.0-1160.24.1.el7
Linux Tools
The lcfg/options/perf-linux.h header for the Linux performance analysis tools previously didn’t include the correct packages on Ubuntu. In particular, the package versions need to match with the currently installed kernel. The way in which the LCFG_OPTIONS_PERF option is enabled has now changed so that it always matches the kernel. Also, a less specifically named, LCFG_KERNEL_TOOLS option has been added since the package provides various tools, not just perf.
Header Deletions
To reduce the number of LCFG headers which need to be manually checked for platform upgrades many old, unused files have been deleted. The LCFG server dependency database was consulted so this shouldn’t cause any problems. If any file is required again it is easy to recover from the svn history at some later date.
profile.packages usage
The usage of the profile.packages resource has been improved in many places so that it matches with recommended best-practices. In particular, the use of the mADD mutator is discouraged as it uses regular expressions, which are slow, and it rarely does exactly what people expect for package lists. The recommended approach is to always include extra packages using the mEXTRA mutator and resolve conflicts using the various prefixes (e.g. + (plus) and - (minus)) when necessary.
Unsupported platforms
To improve the maintainability of the headers, more configuration for older unsupported platforms – such as SL6 and SL5 – has been removed.
New Software
An LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_DEVEL option has been added which can be used to include the python3-dev package and all of its dependencies. That option can be enabled by adding the option name to the profile.pkgcppopts resource, for example:
!profile.pkgcppopts mADD(LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_DEVEL)
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