Hi Everyone,

It gives me great pleasure to announce the formation of the CentOS
Linux AltArch Special Interest Group ( SIG ).

This SIG will be setup and managed by community members who want to come and help port CentOS Linux to architectures and platforms not supported by the Core SIG itself.

Note: this is not called secondary arch group, since the word secondary indicates some level of inferiority – and I would rather we use release tagging ( test, devel, alpha, beta etc ) rather than silo a group into always being only ‘secondary’.

The group would have the ability to import content as needed, adapt content as needed, deliver in media that is suitable and needed for the platform they are targeting.

For vendor driven ecosystems where they own the entire platform and implementation of the platform ( eg. as seen in the ARMv7 and v8 space
), I encourage vendors to get involved with the effort – however do so without making it a role driven position. For the continuity of the effort, its far more productive for vendors to encourage individual level participation from their organisations into the CentOS AltArch effort.

We will retain the requirement that all ‘CentOS‘ branded content must be hosted, built and delivered from infra operated by the CentOS Infra team, signed with a CentOS key ( run by the Core SIG ) and must be freely redistributable ( in line with the CentOS Linux standards and requirements ).

Working process
– – All AltArch SIG’s should aim to use the noarch generated from the x86_64 builds as much as possible
– – All members of the AltArch group should have git.c.o commit access, all content built into an AltArch target should also be hosted at git.CentOS.org in a compatible format to the existing git repositories.

git.CentOS.org:
– – Create arch specific tags in the SIG as needed. eg:
+ altarch-aarch64
+ altarch-power8
+ altarch-i686

These arch’ branches will/can be used to host spec file and source changes as needed specific to that arch. If a change is needed for multiple arch’s, we just need to then carry it in all those branches (
but we can socialise the changeset to the other arch’s that might benefit from this change ). the baseline assumption is that the core protected branch then only corresponds to the x86_64 distro for CentOS
Linux 7, and for i686 + x86_64 on CentOS Linux 5 and 6.

cbs.CentOS.org can grow targets as needed. These targets should map to the git branch names as much as possible, and as hardware is available to contribute into a central pool. Each koji target per branch should have the same tags as the generic SIG targets ( ie. candidate, testing, release ). Users in the altArch group should be able to pull from their own branch, the protected git branches, and other arch branches.

SIG ‘product’ will be release as :
– – to buildlogs and cbs.CentOS.org/repos/ as a testing / devel set of repos and installs as needed
– – to mirror.CentOS.org as ‘stable’ but under a different SIG path. (
http://mirror.CentOS.org/altarch )

External mirrors will not receive this content by default. However, they can opt into receiving it and we encourage them to.

For people who want to work on pre-release platforms, we can come up with a working process that helps them stage and release early on platform availability. This includes manual builds outside of the central pool, as developer PoC builds etc.

The overall aim here is to be openly inclusive to extend the baseline platform that CentOS Linux can run on.

In the coming days, we will organise an inaugural meeting on irc, and invite interested people to come help form the initial bootstrap admin group for the SIG. This initial meeting will also help formalise some of the work that has been happening around the edges already in the Aarch64, ARMv7, PowerPC and i686 platforms around CentOS Linux 7. If you are interested in being a part of this, for any of these architectures ( or others! ), get in touch with me.

enjoy!

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