OpenBMC 2.14 Apparently Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenBMC 2.14 Apparently Released

The OpenBMC Linux Foundation collaborative project providing an open-source operating system / firmware stack for server baseboard management controllers (BMCs) is out with version 2.14. The OpenBMC release management still seems to be in a bit of disarray with OpenBMC 2.13 also having been released yesterday, but at least the code continues moving along...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBMC-2.14-Released

[waxhead]

I don't get what the problem is with releasing 2.14 the day after 2.13. I am simply assuming that it is a bugfix. When using a sane versioning system it is simply yet another revision.

[Michael]

I don't get what the problem is with releasing 2.14 the day after 2.13. I am simply assuming that it is a bugfix. When using a sane versioning system it is simply yet another revision.

It wasn't a day after, they were both released within minutes of each other... So presumably v2.13 forgot to be tagged previously or something. Couldn't find any details but I got notifications for both within minutes.

[sandain]

Since this is git, it is easy to see what changed. Note: a lot changed. 1040 commits, with 267,060 additions and 227,814 deletions over 5,994 files.

[stwcx]

Hi, I'm the primary maintainer of OpenBMC and it seems like some clarification is due.

The majority of the participants on the project take a "live at HEAD" philosophy and do not use releases or tags. Since we are based on Yocto we just follow along with the Yocto poky master branch and we have mostly automation that updates the openbmc-specific recipes in openbmc/openbmc. The majority of the code we develop is outside of this repository in other repositories under the openbmc organization (outside of the base Linux stuff we get from Yocto, of course).

A few participants and some downstream forks (many of which are held privately at various companies that consume OpenBMC) have historically expressed an interest in us making releases. I don't really want to comment on the utility of that approach but we make releases primarily as a service to those who hold to it. Again, since we follow Yocto which does releases 2x a year, we effectively take the same release approach. Shortly after Yocto makes a release we branch the openbmc repository and refresh the contained Yocto tree with the content they included in their release. From that point our master continues along with Yocto master. You will see that we have branches that are named the same as the Yocto releases (and corresponding Yocto branches) for this reason.

Effectively, any release of OpenBMC is just a point-in-time that happens to correspond to some Yocto release. In theory, some consumers might be able to pick up security fixes from Yocto for these releases and I generally try to refresh our branches with these Yocto branches periodically.

As far as 2.12, 2.13, and 2.14 go...

• 2.12 corresponded to the Yocto Kirkstone release. For 2.11 we had one company that was serious about running a regression test and reporting results but they seemed to have ceased doing that. I created a release candidate on July '22, but received no feedback and forgot to tag it until Nov '22.
• 2.13 corresponded to the Yocto Langdale release. I think there was some discussion on Discord, but no one seemed especially interested in testing the 2.13 release after I created the branch. I went ahead and tagged what is there at the beginning of May.
• 2.14 corresponded to the Yocto Mickledore release. Knowing that there was a big drop-off in release testing in the past few releases, I simply gave everyone a 2-week window to report issues with the release candidate tag and then created the 2.14 release.

One artifact of the "release" timing vs the "tag" timing is due to Github treating them as two separate things and I forgot until I was reminded by someone mentioning to me that there was a tag without a release.

Feel free to reach out if there is anything else I can clarify.

- Patrick

[stwcx]

Since this is git, it is easy to see what changed. Note: a lot changed. 1040 commits, with 267,060 additions and 227,814 deletions over 5,994 files.

While this is all true, keep in mind:

1. A big portion of those changes are coming from Yocto Poky itself.
2. Most of our code is not reflected in openbmc/openbmc because they're assorted compiled code in their own repository under the openbmc organization. It is somewhat a challenge to get a picture of "how many lines of code did the OpenBMC team change between these releases" due to the separation of Yocto recipes vs code packages.