Red Hat / Fedora Family / IBM Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2024

• Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Fedora Week of Diversity 2024: With Roland Taylor

  Article co-authored by Chris Idoko and Jona Azizaj

  Today’s Contributor Story comes from: Roland Taylor

  Hi there! I’m Roland Taylor, a designer and a big open source advocate. I’ve actually been using open source software since I was a teenager. Curiosity was my driving force—that’s what got me toying around with technology and experimenting with different things. Since everything was free, it made it super easy to jump right in, play around, and see how it all worked. I started using GNU/Linux way back in the days of backdoored Windows 2000 and backdoored Windows XP, when there was a version called DSL. It was this tiny version that you could install on your system, perfect for exploration. Over the years, I kept diving deeper and deeper into the world of GNU/Linux and open source.

  Now, about how I found Fedora… I actually stumbled upon it online first, but back then, I didn’t know much about it and wasn’t brave enough to try it out. To be honest, I was afraid of being overwhelmed. I assumed Fedora was either strictly for businesses or too specialized and way above my skill level, so I thought it would’ve just been above my head. So, for years, I just skipped over it, thinking I’d never understand it. Furthermore, I’d heard that it didn’t come with the necessary drivers to run smoothly on most systems. I would say my assumptions and biases kept me in the dark.

  Then, one day while studying, I saw someone using Fedora on real hardware. He noticed I was on a GNU/Linux system and asked if I’d heard of Fedora. I said yes, but I didn’t use it because I thought it was too complex. That conversation sparked my interest, and I started learning more. I discovered it was actually user-friendly—just another distribution I could explore. It took a few years after that before I really jumped in, though. I think I may have tried it once or twice on a virtual machine back then, but never for very long.

• Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Fedora Week of Diversity 2024: With Robert Wright

  Today marks Day 2 of Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD) 2024! This exciting week-long celebration is dedicated to honoring the diverse voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that enrich our vibrant Fedora community. Throughout Fedora Week of Diversity 2024, the DEI Team will be showcasing the incredible stories and journeys of our members through engaging interviews and captivating social control media spotlights. Join us in celebrating the unique contributions and talents that make Fedora Week of Diversity 2024 a truly special event!

• Fedora Infrastructure Status: wiki upgrade

  We will be upgrading the wiki to a newer version. During this outage the wiki will be down.

• Fedora Magazine ☛ Fedora Magazine: Contribute at the Fedora GNU/Linux Rawhide Test Week for A11Y 2024-06-19

  In the spirit of fostering a diverse and inclusive community, Fedora is proud to announce its upcoming Accessibility (a11y) Test Week. As part of the Fedora Week of Diversity, this event, running from June 19 to June 25, 2024. It aims to ensure that our software is accessible to everyone, including individuals with disabilities. This initiative is not just about refining software but about affirming Fedora’s commitment to accessibility and inclusivity.

• Red Hat Official ☛ Introducing Ansible Lightspeed playbook generation and on-premise deployments

  With Ansible Lightspeed, users can now generate entire Ansible Playbooks from a single natural language prompt.

• Weekly status of Packit Team: Week 24 in Packit

  We have fixed a bug that caused inconsistency between the promised environment variables (from the docs) and the environment that has been actually provided.

• Red Hat ☛ Adding support for s390x in LLD, the LLVM linker

  LLD is a linker developed by the LLVM project. It is a drop-in replacement for the system linker and aims to consume less resources than them.

  LLD provides production-quality support for the following architectures:

  • AArch64 and ARM
  • LoongArch
  • MIPS
  • PowerPC and PowerPC64
  • RISC-V
  • x86-32 and x86-64

  Despite this list, there is still one architecture supported by Fedora that was missing: s390x. This absence impacts how Fedora packages are built on s390x, either by prohibiting packages that require LLD or by requiring that the s390x package is linked with a different linker than other architectures. This difference is known to increase the maintenance burden because different linkers can behave differently.

  The support for s390x was added to LLD 18.1. In this article, we explore the work involved in order to get the support for s390x upstream and all the tests that were implemented and executed.

  The port

  Porting LLD to s390x consists of implementing the open source ELF Application Binary Interface - s390x Supplement in LLD.

  Adding support for a new architecture to LLD may benefit from previous work: LLVM already supported s390x and LLD already supported ELF files. That allows for the new s390x code in LLD to reuse both these implementations, reducing the development time.

• Red Hat ☛ Build applications with Paketo Buildpacks and Red Bait UBI container images

  With the growth in the use of containers, the need to bundle your application into a container has never been stronger. Many Red Bait customers will be familiar with Source-to-Image (S2I) as an easy way to build container images from application source code. While S2I is a convenient way to build images on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Bait works to support our customers when using a variety of approaches, and we’ve recently seen an increasing interest in building applications using Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Buildpacks.  

  This is the first in a 5-part series of articles on building your applications with C and UBI. The series will include:

  • Building applications with Paketo Buildpacks and Red Bait UBI container images (this post)
  • Running applications with Paketo Buildpacks and Red Bait UBI container images in OpenShift
  • The journey to enable UBI with the Paketo Buildpacks
  • Building applications with UBI and Paketo Buildpacks in CI/CD
  • Building a container image for a Quarkus project using buildpacks

  CNCF Buildpacks

  There are a number of CNCF Buildpacks implementations and one of the leading ones is Paketo Buildpacks, which have a long pedigree, having been based on buildpacks used in Cloud Foundry. Traditionally the Paketo ecosystem was centered around Debian (Ubuntu) based images along with external tarballs to install runtimes. Use of the Linux distribution runtime packages was difficult because CNCF Buildpacks deliberately disallowed dependencies that required root to modify the build environment. The TLDR; is that buildpacks pulled in third party tarballs (unsupported) instead of being able to leverage runtimes from GNU/Linux distributions like Red Bait supported rpms.