At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
Amy
*Amy Marrich*
She/Her/Hers
Principal Technical Marketing Manager - Cloud Platforms
Red Hat, Inc https://www.redhat.com/
amy@redhat.com
Mobile: 954-818-0514
Slack: amarrich
IRC: spotz
On 6/17/26 21:30, Amy Marrich via devel wrote:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
As Infra person, I'd like to be involved in such discussion :)
I'm for example astonished (somehow) by the "HSM for secureboot" item as the board never answered the question raised in 2021 about it : https://gitlab.com/CentOS/Board/tracker/-/work_items/67 ..
So while people can ask for hardware, it's better to have a plan, architecture it and then (only then) come with list of requirements ? :)
Fabian,
I'll put it on the agenda for next month's meeting. I'm guessing ghost_user on the ticket might be Davide due to the mention of Hyperscale and he mentioned it in the meeting.
Amy
*Amy Marrich*
She/Her/Hers
Principal Technical Marketing Manager - Cloud Platforms
Red Hat, Inc https://www.redhat.com/
amy@redhat.com
Mobile: 954-818-0514
Slack: amarrich
IRC: spotz
On Wed, Jun 17, 2026 at 2:56 PM Fabian Arrotin arrfab@centos.org wrote:
On 6/17/26 21:30, Amy Marrich via devel wrote:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
As Infra person, I'd like to be involved in such discussion :)
I'm for example astonished (somehow) by the "HSM for secureboot" item as the board never answered the question raised in 2021 about it : https://gitlab.com/CentOS/Board/tracker/-/work_items/67 ..
So while people can ask for hardware, it's better to have a plan, architecture it and then (only then) come with list of requirements ? :)
-- Fabian Arrotin The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | @arrfab[@fosstodon.org] _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.centos.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@lists.centos.org
* Amy Marrich via devel:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
Maybe this: Move the AArch64 builders to at least Neoverse-V1, preferably a later generation? It will give us some flexibility in future architecture baseline choices.
Similarly, we really need the ppc64le builders to move to POWER10 (but I think that's already tracked as a task).
Thanks, Florian
On 6/19/26 08:58, Florian Weimer via devel wrote:
- Amy Marrich via devel:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
Maybe this: Move the AArch64 builders to at least Neoverse-V1, preferably a later generation? It will give us some flexibility in future architecture baseline choices.
Similarly, we really need the ppc64le builders to move to POWER10 (but I think that's already tracked as a task).
Thanks, Florian
Hi Florian,
The cbs koji aarch64 builders are m6g.4xlarge and so already on Neoverse-N1 and for ppc64le these are also Power10 .. but I guess you meant for Stream Infra ? that's something different and I guess (?) that based on the topic/subject, it was about "community" hardware so infra that community (outside of internal stream infra) can interact with.
But you're right for Power10, there are plans for the internal Stream builders to be migrated to Power10 .
* Fabian Arrotin:
On 6/19/26 08:58, Florian Weimer via devel wrote:
- Amy Marrich via devel:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
Maybe this: Move the AArch64 builders to at least Neoverse-V1, preferably a later generation? It will give us some flexibility in future architecture baseline choices. Similarly, we really need the ppc64le builders to move to POWER10 (but I think that's already tracked as a task).
The cbs koji aarch64 builders are m6g.4xlarge and so already on Neoverse-N1 and for ppc64le these are also Power10 ..
It seems m6g.4xlarge is Graviton2, which uses Neoverse-N1 cores. That's one generation before Neoverse-V1.
(AWS does not commit to specific CPU feature sets for their instance types, so reliable information is kind of hard to come by.)
but I guess you meant for Stream Infra ?
Yes, that as well. Consistency benefits everyone.
Thanks, Florian
On 6/19/26 11:43, Florian Weimer wrote:
- Fabian Arrotin:
On 6/19/26 08:58, Florian Weimer via devel wrote:
- Amy Marrich via devel:
At the June CentOS Board meeting, we were asked about pain points with hardware in the community to see what the Community Linux Engineering team might be able to assist with. The board came up with a HSM for secureboot and RISC-V hardware, but we want to know - what does the community as a whole think is a hardware pain point we can work on resolving?
Maybe this: Move the AArch64 builders to at least Neoverse-V1, preferably a later generation? It will give us some flexibility in future architecture baseline choices. Similarly, we really need the ppc64le builders to move to POWER10 (but I think that's already tracked as a task).
The cbs koji aarch64 builders are m6g.4xlarge and so already on Neoverse-N1 and for ppc64le these are also Power10 ..
It seems m6g.4xlarge is Graviton2, which uses Neoverse-N1 cores. That's one generation before Neoverse-V1.
(AWS does not commit to specific CPU feature sets for their instance types, so reliable information is kind of hard to come by.)
*ack* and that I can easily change so let me see which instance type we can use that would have Neoverse-V1 and then plan this for a sprint to come (and announce when done but that's trivial)
but I guess you meant for Stream Infra ?
Yes, that as well. Consistency benefits everyone.
Thanks, Florian
Worth knowing that for Stream infra there is actually no planned hardware replacement for aarch64, still on : Model name: Neoverse-N1 BIOS Model name: Ampere(R) Altra(R) Max Processor
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Amy Marrich -
Fabian Arrotin -
Florian Weimer