OpenStack

Fair warning: This is gonna be looooong. Proceed at your own risk. ;-)

Introduction

Since I started working with OpenShift on baremetal one of the things I've wanted to do is deploy OpenShift using OpenStack Virtual Baremetal to provide the host VMs. The usual developer setup is dev-scripts, which uses libvirt to stand up a virtual baremetal environment. This works fine, but it has a few drawbacks:

The Oslo team held its second virtual PTG this week. We had a number of good discussions and even ran slightly over the 2 hours we scheduled, so I think it was a successful event. The first hour was mostly topics relating to Oslo itself, while the second hour was set aside for some cross-project discussions with the Nova team. Read on for details of both hours.

Despite my trepidation about the trip (some of it well-founded!), I made it to Shanghai and back for the Open Infrastructure Summit and Project Teams Gathering. I even managed to get some work done while I was there. :-)

First, I recommend reading the opening of Colleen Murphy's blog post about the event (and the rest of it too, if you have any interest in what Keystone is up to). It does an excellent job of describing the week at a high level. To summarize in my own words, the energy of this event was a little off. Many regular contributors were not present because of the travel situation and there was less engagement from local contributors than I would have hoped for. However, that doesn't mean nothing good came out of it!

In fact, it was a surprisingly active week for Oslo, especially given that only myself and two other cores were there and we had limited discussion within the team. It turns out Oslo was a popular topic of conversation in various Forum sessions, particularly oslo.messaging. This led to some good conversation at the PTG and a proposal for a new Oslo library. Not only were both Oslo summit sessions well attended, but good questions were asked in both so people weren't just there waiting for the next talk. ;-) In fact, I went 10 minutes over time on the project update (oops!), in part because I hadn't really planned time for questions since I've never gotten any in the past. Not complaining though.

Read on for more detail about all of this.

Just back from the Denver Summit and PTG, so here are my thoughts about the Summit. I expect to post my PTG wrapup to the openstack-discuss mailing list since it's more developer-specific.

As foretold in a previous post, OVB has been imported to OpenStack Infra. The repo can now be found at https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/openstack-virtual-baremetal. All future development will happen there so you should update any existing references you may have. In addition, changes will now be proposed via Gerrit instead of Github pull requests. \o/

I recently helped track down a bug exposed by a recent oslo.privsep release that added threading to allow parallel privileged calls. It was a segfault happening in the privsep daemon that was caused by a C call in a privileged Neutron module. This, as you might expect, was a little tricky to debug so I thought I'd document the process for posterity.

As promised in my previous update on OVB, the 2.0-dev branch has been merged to master. If this breaks you, switch to the stable/1.0 branch, which is the same as master was prior to the 2.0-dev merge. Note that this does not mean OVB is officially 2.0 yet. I've found a couple more deprecated things that need to be removed before we declare 2.0. That will likely happen soon though.

There is some work underway to import the OVB repo from Github into the OpenStack Gerrit instance. This will allow us to more easily set up gate jobs so proposed changes can be tested automatically instead of the current "system" which involves me pulling down changes and running the test script against them. It will have some implications for users of OVB in the near future, so this is a summary of the plans and actions that need to be taken.

As mentioned in a previous update, OVB 2.0 is coming. This update to is to notify everyone that a development branch is available in the repo and discuss some of the changes made so far.

These topics may seem like strange bedfellows, but trust me: there's a method to my madness. Originally this was going to be part of my Berlin summit post, but as I was writing it got rather long and I started to feel it was important enough to deserve a standalone post. Since there are two separate but related topics here, I've split the post. If you're interested in my technical thoughts on upstream performance testing, read on. If you're only interested in the click-baity release-shaming part, feel free to skip to that section. It mostly stands on its own.