January 2022 Quarterly report submitted by: Jefro Osier-Mixon, Red Hat - acting chair

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This SIG does not have a formal membership process. The mailing list currently has 77 subscribers representing at least yy companies. I have been asked to act as chair for the first few months in order to stabilize the SIG.

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Releases in the most recent quarter (or most recent release, if none in that quarter)

The SIG is not yet creating builds or publishing releases, but we are very close to doing so at this point; see the report below.

Health report and general activity narrative.

The SIG has had two public meetings per month, one formal and one informal "office hours", each with 25-40 attendees representing 7-10 separate organizations. We feel this is a good start at corporate community diversity but will continue to work toward a community-driven project. This SIG is intended to be a community effort with contributions and shared benefits from all participants. 

Several RH employees made the first contribution to the project as well as the infrastructure required to build and test it. We now occupy a gitlab repository building software regularly, with build instructions provided, and we are on track for a downloadable release in Q1 2022.

This is a high-level summary of current activity from our technical lead:

- The work keeps on going at: https://gitlab.com/redhat/automotive/automotive-sig
- We have created manifests in that repository that can be used with OSBuild to
  create a number of images.
- We currently support:
  - qemu and raspberry pi
  - x86_64 and aarch64,
  - ostree-based (default) and non-ostree-based
  - booting via uefi of by-passing it and booting directly the kernel
- We then have 3 images
  - minimal
  - osbuilder (containing the tools allowing to build images with osbuild)
  - neptune (demo image with a graphical interface running the demo app:
    neptune)
- The OSBuild manifests have been streamed-line and simplified a lot. If you have
  not look at them in a while have a look !
- We have also added a mechanism to easily build images from within a virtual
  machine, which makes it easier to build images without root privileges.
- The VM created for the step just above (^) can also be migrated to a different
  system, thus allowing to build more easily in a different architecture.
- Instructions on how to build images have also been greatly simplified
  The doc at: https://sigs.centos.org/automotive/building/ is up to date
- We have a kernel-auto package based on the CentOS-Stream package and with the
  Real-Time patches included
- We have a few koji tags set-up for the SIG, the kernel-auto is the main
  beneficiary of them (with a couple of other RT related packages)
- We are working on automatically building some of our sample images and making
  them available.
  A few of them can be found at: https://pingou.fedorapeople.org/images/ but
  this is a temporary location and they are now over a month old.
- We have been sending weekly updates to the SIG mailing list on a regular
  cadence and will try to continue doing it.

Issues for the board to address, if any

None, keep up the excellent work :)