Not much actual change this week but quite a bit of development work has been happening recently, the fruits of that work are not yet quite ready for general consumption. Here are the notable changes…

Installer

The Ubuntu installer will now always run the ntpdate command early in the install process. As well as kinit, core software such as the apt package manager rely on accurate time.

fstab

The schema for the LCFG fstab component has been updated to version 6 on Ubuntu. This moves the mountby resource from the partition list to the disk list, that aligns with the behaviour of the FAI setup-storage utility. At this stage the primary disk resources are now set to mount by UUID which will eventually result in partitions such as /boot/efi being mounted reliably. The current version of the fstab component does not yet actually implement that feature, work on the component code to improve a number of features is ongoing.

Kernel

There is new support for the 6.8.0 series for Ubuntu Jammy, that may be enabled by specifying the KERNEL_SERIES_6080 package option. Note that this version is not supported by our current version of OpenAFS and it appears that Virtualbox may also need updating.

nvidia

The 550 series is now the default for Ubuntu Focal and Jammy.

LCFG Client

There is a new version of the LCFG client available for testing, this may be enabled by including the lcfg/options/lcfg-client-testing.h header. This will undergo several weeks of testing before it is rolled out to production systems.

This fixes a number of fairly minor issues:

• The bootstamp file will now be updated at boot time. This file is used to provide a timestamp for the last system boot to the LCFG server. This feature has been broken in Ubuntu for a long time.
• The internal code used to check if an LCFG component was started at boot time has been completely revised. On SL7 this relied on checking if the component was in the systemd.units resource. For Ubuntu the component service files are shipped with the package, not generated, so this code never worked as intended for Ubuntu platforms. This feature is used to provide a list of component booted/started status to the LCFG server (components may have been started manually some time after boot which is why there are 2 separate pieces of status information).
• Serialisation of internal status information now uses YAML rather than a horrible combination of the Data::Dumper module and a string eval. This should make the code more robust against any data corruption.
• Nearly all references to “rpms” are now replaced with the generic “packages” term.

Changes to headers and package lists

Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.

Weekly Changes – 19/08/2024 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0