CentOS Hyperscale Workstation Sees Experimental OS Builds, More Changes Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: CentOS Hyperscale Workstation Sees Experimental OS Builds, More Changes Coming

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CentOS-Hyperscale-Q2-2021

[cjcox]

You lost me at CentOS.

[danmcgrew]

CentOS is a Dead Man Walking, and not only is it the serious subject of improvement by (apparently) otherwise intelligent, well-qualified developers, but these 'improvement' efforts get touted in the press as if this is NEWS-WORTHY.

What am I missing here?

[RahulSundaram]

CentOS is a Dead Man Walking, and not only is it the serious subject of improvement by (apparently) otherwise intelligent, well-qualified developers, but these 'improvement' efforts get touted in the press as if this is NEWS-WORTHY.

What am I missing here?

You are missing these SIGs and their participants like Facebook and Twitter and so forth are interested in CentOS Stream and use it in production.

[CommunityMember]

I am hoping the Hyperscale SIG will start to offer LTO (and possibly PGO) optimized kernels, rather than just compiling/running them internally.

[Sonadow]

RahulSundaram This statement made by the Hyperscale SIG doesn't make sense at all:

* UEFI boot is not supported. CBS does not support signing kernels such that we can leverage the Secure Boot infrastructure, so UEFI is not supported at all right now. The issue is tracked here: https://pagure.io/centos-infra/issue/307

The link plainly describes issues with getting the SIG kernel signed. That's a Secure Boot issue. Not a UEFI boot issue. They telling us that we must drop our machines into CSM mode just to use CentOS Hyperscale. That just can't be right.

Even if Secure Boot isn't supported, it's a reasonable expectation that UEFI boot be possible. All x64 devices are mandated by Microsoft to allow Secure Boot to be disabled by the user. Even my Skylake laptop which does not allow custom keys to be installed has the option to turn it off.

Can you clarify?

[Sonadow]

The Hyperscale Workstation spin is built on the GNOME desktop. It is my intent to also offer a KDE Plasma flavor once it becomes reasonably possible. This is blocked on KDE Plasma getting rebuilt in EPEL-Next for the updated Qt5 in CentOS Stream 8. Both desktops are capable of leveraging the technologies being developed by the Hyperscale SIG and we intend to use this to showcase that.

That's good news. It's my practise to install both Gnome and Plasma Wayland for convenience, even if I only use one of them. Having both installed resolves just about all the dependencies for most GUI applications.

[RahulSundaram]

RahulSundaram This statement made by the Hyperscale SIG doesn't make sense at all:
...
Can you clarify?

I wouldn't be able to as I am not involved with the group now. You could ask in their mailing list.