The first CentOS Dojo of the year is, as usual, held as a FOSDEM Fringe event. It’s virtual - again - which is a blessing and a curse. It would be fun to travel and meet people in person again once the situation permits, then again, given my family situation that would have meant I would have to skip for the next year or two anyway.

That being said, it was held on Hopin, which has a decent hallway track experience. Nothing much is changing on the platform front - linux.conf.au was on Venueless again, and FOSDEM is again using a bleeding edge Element web client at chat.fosdem.org. I like the Hopin and Element experience, though I admit to a bias - Element because I like decentralized platforms, and Hopin because I know more people among the attendees of events held there. And Hopin is still unpredictably buggy on Firefox!

Platform talk aside, Dojo was full of interesting talks - and I bookmarked so many FOSDEM talks to attend (some overlapping!) even though I limit myself to “only” talks that start after 3 AM Pacific Time! (noon Brussels time). Looking forward to things settling down after that - from the beginning of January up to now it’s been a flurry of conferences (LCA! Devconf.cz! Dojo! FOSDEM!) and performance evaluation, that there’s less time to get to work - and to write. Still hoping to actually get to 100 posts this year, though realistically I’ll probably get up to 50.

I presented ebranch, a tool I’m writing (it’s open source, so hopefully it will not be /only/ me for long!) to address some of the pain points in bringing up EPEL for every new RHEL/CentOS Stream release (abstract, slides, video). If you’re interested in getting Fedora packages into EPEL so you can use them on Enterprise Linux distros - from RHEL to CentOS Stream to Alma, Rocky, even Oracle – hopefully you find this useful! There are many functionalities that are planned but not implemented yet, and I probably will dedicate a few hours a week to improving it (and reviewing your PRs, I promise). Sadly the rest of the time will be mostly spent on debugging Rawhide GCC12 failures :p

I was about to highlight some of the talks I liked from Dojo, then realized… that I liked most of them, so it will be redundant to list them all. But … alright, you definitely should watch these:

  • Tracking Kernel Rate of Change by Pat Riehecky analyzed the CentOS Stream kernels corresponding to the development period between RHEL 8.4 and 8.5, and found that most external kernel modules actually do surprisingly well - a few needs to be rebuilt 3 times, but most required only one rebuild. It’s not the firehose that is the Fedora kernel! Given the reality that many users still need the Nvidia kernel, hopefully this can encourage Nvidia to start supporting Stream - their kernel module is called out as actually being the easiest to support.
  • The Experience Contributing to CentOS Stream by Neal Gompa. Stream 9, being the first proper Stream release, really shows that Red Hat is making a good faith effort at developing in the open and incorporating community contributions. There are still rough edges but it’s a far cry from Stream 8 (or… the days before Stream).
  • Hyperscale SIG update by my colleague Davide Cavalca – EPEL can’t override base Stream packages, but Hyperscale can! Come join us
  • Every EPEL talk on the schedule is worth watching!

This post is day 16 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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