Vinícius Ferrão
f8469e2074
Nodes could not know whether an image turned the root image checksum on. An initial ramdisk built before the check booted the image unchecked, and nothing reported it. An archive packed before the check had no checksum for a new initial ramdisk to find. When the image or the site turns the checksum on, nodeset adds rootimgchecksum=yes to the kernel command line of the node. This applies to stateless and statelite ramdisk nodes. genimage writes <initrd>.rootimgcheck next to an initial ramdisk that can check. The marker holds the SHA-256 checksum of the initial ramdisk, so a replaced ramdisk does not match it. imgexport and imgimport carry the marker with the ramdisk. When the checksum is on, nodeset warns once for each image whose initial ramdisk has no matching marker. Its nodes may boot the image unchecked. nodeset judges the initial ramdisk in TFTP after it copies the boot files, because nodes boot that copy, also with --noupdateinitrd. A copy that fails is now an error for the node, instead of a boot entry for the previous boot files. genimage and nodeset write a checksum for each archive of the image directory that has none, also when the check is off. Nodes with older boot entries still check. genimage does it before it copies a new initial ramdisk to TFTP, and nodeset before it copies the boot files of a node. Both hold the publication lock while they write. When they cannot write the checksum, they keep the boot files that nodes use now and report how to recover. With the check off, nodeset reports it as a warning instead, and still sets up the node. nodeset marks the boot files of an image as copied only after this step succeeds. When the first node of an image fails it, the next node copies them. The change covers the Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu nodeset plugins, which share one helper in xCAT::SvrUtils.
xCAT
xCAT is a toolkit for deployment and administration of clusters of all sizes.
The xCAT sunset was only a quick eclipse
Dear xCAT Community,
The xCAT sunset has changed course. VersatusHPC has been invited to join the xCAT Consortium, and future development will move toward direct upstream contributions coordinated with the Consortium and its existing member companies.
That matters most for Enterprise Linux 10 (EL10). EL10 support is coming to xCAT, restoring a future operating-system path for sites that still rely on xCAT. This is an important change from the previous sunset guidance, where the lack of an EL10 path was one of the strongest reasons to move away from xCAT.
The xCAT Consortium continues to recommend Confluent as the long-term successor to xCAT, and that remains the Consortium position. Users planning new cluster-management deployments should evaluate Confluent and its xCAT comparison documentation.
At the same time, xCAT is no longer sunsetted. The Consortium and participating companies will continue updating xCAT while there is community and user demand for it.
In summary:
- xCAT development is continuing upstream through the Consortium and participating companies.
- Enterprise Linux 10 support is coming.
- Confluent remains the Consortium-recommended successor and migration path.
- xCAT updates will continue while there is community and user demand.
We want to thank the xCAT Consortium and community for keeping this project moving. The sun went behind the moon for a moment, but xCAT is still here.
For more information on Confluent and how to get started, please visit the Confluent: Project Page, Documentation or Confluent vs xCAT comparison.
With thanks,
The xCAT Consortium
Documentation
xCAT Documentation is hosted on Read The Docs: https://xcat-docs.readthedocs.io
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xCAT is made available under the EPL license: https://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php
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