October 2022 Quarterly report submitted by: Jefro Osier-Mixon, Red Hat -
acting chair
_____________________________________
Membership update
This SIG does not have a formal membership process. The mailing list
currently has 99 subscribers representing at least 31 organizations, though
not all subscribers use corporate emails and some are participating as
individuals.
_____________________________________
Releases in the most recent quarter (or most recent release, if none in
that quarter)
The SIG provides a new distribution: Automotive Stream Distribution
(AutoSD), a CentOS Stream derivative designed specifically around the needs
of an automotive OS, and transparently the upstream project for Red Hat's
eventual in-vehicle OS product. AutoSD has been downloaded and used by many
organizations who have commented or asked for help, so we know it is
getting some traction though of course we don't have exact metrics on usage.
_____________________________________
Health report and general activity narrative
The CentOS Automotive SIG celebrated its first year anniversary in August.
The SIG has typically had 1-2 public meetings per month, one formal and one
informal "office hours", each with 25-40 attendees, with visible
participation from 7-10 separate organizations. The office hours portion
has been on hiatus since July as summer vacations brought attendance to a
crawl, but we intend to start them back up in October.
This SIG is intended to be a community effort with contributions and shared
benefits from all participants. All formal meetings are recorded and posted
on this page:
https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Automotive/Meetings
Several Red Hat employees made the initial contributions to the project as
well as the infrastructure required to build and test it. We occupy a
gitlab repository in the CentOS namespace building software regularly using
CI, with build instructions provided on the documentation page at https://
sigs.centos.org/automotive/ . Sample images are present and downloadable
along with customization and build instructions.
This is a high-level summary of activity over our first year as outlined on
the CentOS blog
<https://blog.centos.org/2022/08/centos-automotive-sig-first-year-in-review/>
:
We worked to define what the Automotive SIG is producing and we landed on
three artifacts:
- AutoSD, a CentOS-Stream based linux distribution which is the public,
in-development version of the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (similar
to CentOS Stream for RHEL).
- An Automotive SIG RPM repository that allows the community to expand the
content of AutoSD or experiment with some of its parts.
- Sample images, built using OSBuild, which provide examples of how to
assemble production images based on AutoSD, customized for some hardware,
including container images, based on CoreOS/ostree technologies.
All of this resides in a repository on gitlab, in the CentOS namespace with
the infrastructure to enable CI/CD for a basic distribution. We are
building a set of nightly images for different use-cases, and have a robust
set of documentation at the above link.
Not a lot of high-level features have been introduced over the past few
months due to vacation schedules, but the distro is doing very well and now
supports a SOAFEE implementation along with container support based on
podman and systemd. In addition, we are pleased to have had the first
contribution from outside Red Hat (thanks Volvo!).
_____________________________________
Issues for the board to address, if any
None, keep up the excellent work :)
Jeffrey "Jefro" Osier-Mixon | jefro(a)redhat.com
Red Hat Office of the CTO | Sr. Principal Community Architect, Automotive
I just today merged[1] initial support for android boot in the sample
images. This is still somewhat experimental, but allows some level of
support for aboot.
The support has multiple parts:
* The abootimg rpm has an app that can create aboot images.
* The aboot-update rpm has integration between the kernel and aboot. It
looks
at the /boot/aboot.cfg file for aboot options and applies them for a
kernel version
producing a file /boot/aboot-${kernel_version}.img. It also hooks into
the kernel
rpms to run automatically when a new kernel is installed.
* The osbuild-aboot rpm, which must be installed on the build host, adds
some
new osbuild stages that use aboot-update. (This is in a separate copr)
* A new "abootqemu" target which is similar to the existing "qemu" target,
but using
aboot instead of grub/efi.
* Support in runvm for --aboot, which uses a custom bios that supports
aboot. This
allows testing of the aboot-based boot. (Only on aarch64 atm.)
A full example of testing this:
$ sudo dnf copr enable alexl/osbuild-aboot
$ sudo dnf install osbuild-aboot
$ make cs9-abootqemu-minimal-regular.aarch64.qcow2
$ make qemu-u-boot-aarch64.bin
$ ./runvm --aboot --arch aarch64
cs9-abootqemu-minimal-regular.aarch64.qcow2
The qemu boot output:
U-Boot 2022.07 (Aug 26 2022 - 00:00:00 +0000)
[...]
Device 0: 1af4 VirtIO Block Device
Type: Hard Disk
Capacity: 8192.0 MB = 8.0 GB (16777216 x 512)
... is now current device
Found Android Boot Image
virtio read: device 0 block # 2048, count 131072 ... 131072 blocks
read: OK
Kernel load addr 0x50000000 size 10232 KiB
Kernel command line: root=UUID=76a22bf4-f153-4541-b6c7-0332c0dfaeac ro
loglevel=4 efi=runtime console=ttyAMA0
RAM disk load addr 0x11000000 size 25563 KiB
Uncompressing Kernel Image
Loading Ramdisk to fe709000, end fffff8c6 ... OK
Loading Device Tree to 00000000fe606000, end 00000000fe708fff ... OK
Starting kernel ...
[ 0.000000] ACPI: Failed to init ACPI tables
Welcome to CentOS Stream 9 dracut-057-13.git20220816.el9 (Initramfs)!
[...]
[1] https://gitlab.com/CentOS/automotive/sample-images/-/merge_requests/116
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Alexander Larsson Red Hat, Inc
alexl(a)redhat.com alexander.larsson(a)gmail.com
