Good Morning Everyone,

So here are some of the changes that we have worked on last week:

* Resizing the '/' partition:

After flashing an image onto a SD card, by default the '/' isn't extended to the full size of the disk. The documentation at: https://sigs.centos.org/automotive/building/resize_partition/ provides instructions on how one can resize that partition to make use of the entire size of their SD card.

* It is now possible to build external image manifest with the sample-image repo

If you run make with the IMAGEDIR=/path/to/manifest/dir then the makefile will automatically pick up any manifest files there and build them just like the regular sample manifests. This makes it easier to maintain and experiment with your own manifests ouside of the repo.

* All manifests now enable EFI runtime services

The realtime kernel normally disables EFI runtime services because the kernel cannot make realtime guarantees about all possible EFI firmwares. However, supporting EFI is important, so the manifest now default to passing efi=runtime on the kernel commandline to enable this.

* Ability to add custom prefixes to image builds

If you prepend `@something` to the build target, like so:

$ make cs9-qemu-minimal-ostree@sometag.x86_64.qcow2

That will be picked up as the resulting filename of the build, although the build is not affected in other ways. This is useful if you want to build a modified image, for example adding some rpms, and want to distinguish the resultant build from unmodified ones.

* Lookaside cache structure on CentOS

The work we have done to allow a structure in CentOS' lookaside cache which does not rely on a git branching structure as been announced on the centos-devel mailing list: https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2022-April/120351.html

Happy hacking!

Pierre