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RHEL support in DCI

If you are using RHEL you are probably familiar with CDN or FTP. CDN contains officially released and supported content. FTP contains pre-release content. The FTP is updated manually and on demand. DCI allows you to get access to pre-release content in an automated way.

RHEL compose

Red Hat Enterprise Linux content is in the form of a compose. A compose is a list of RPMs grouped by variants and by architectures.

Arches

DCI supports x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le architectures.

Variants

DCI supports AppStream, BaseOS, CRB, HighAvailability, NFV, RT, ResilientStorage, SAP, SAPHANA variants.

Versions

RHEL major version corresponds to the first digit in the version number. Currently there is 2 major version of RHEL in DCI: version 8 and version 9

RHEL minor version corresponds to the second digit in the version number. E.g. RHEL-8.5 or RHEL-9.0.

Tags

Each composes are tagged. A compose can have the tag nightly, candidate, milestone or update.

  • nightly composes are built every day, tested and imported to Beaker and Openstack. Those nightlies contain verified RPMs.

  • When Red Hat prepare the next RHEL version, a nightly become candidate then milestone. nightly, candidate and milestone composes are all the very same composes with the very same content, they differ in the amount of testing they received.

  • When a compose is released and supported by Red Hat, some updates are continuously produced. Some composes after General Availability are tagged with the update tags.

Note: composes are tested internally. When tests failed DCI ignore those composes. So it is normal that the last nightly could be a few days old.

Topics

A topic is an abstraction to group different composes together. The name of the topic contains the major and minor version. E.g. RHEL-8.5.

For example you can list the components for the RHEL-9.0 topic:

  • RHEL-9.0.0-20211121.7 | tags: nightly, kernel:5.14.0-17.el9
  • RHEL-9.0.0-20211120.6 | tags: nightly, kernel:5.14.0-17.el9
  • RHEL-9.0.0-20211026.1 | tags: candidate, kernel:5.14.0-17.el9

Note: When you list topics in DCI you may see a channel in the name. E.g. RHEL-8.4-milestone. This feature has been deprecated in favor of dci-downloader filters.

If you want to access RHEL-9.0 nightlies only for example, you will have the appropriate filter in your settings file.

topics:
  - name: RHEL-9.0
    filters:
      - type: compose
        tag: nightly

Note: We recommend to use the topic name without filters. Like that you will always have the latest component available for the topic.

External Beaker

It is possible to use a beaker instance that isn't under DCI control. The following steps need to be done.

  • Configure ~/.beaker_client/config
  • HUB_URL point to the beaker instance and configure authentication. If you are using kerberos you will need to kinit with either a keytab or a password before running the dci-rhel-agent-ctl command.
  • Add the contents of /etc/dci-rhel-agent/secrets/id_rsa.pub to the ssh keys of the user in beaker
  • https://BEAKER.FQDN/prefs/#ssh-public-keys
  • Add the FQDN of the system you want to test against in /etc/dci-rhel-agent/settings.yml
topics:
  - topic: RHEL-8.6
    systems:
      - SUT.IN.BEAKER.FQDN
  • Finally pass --ext-bkr to the dci-rhel-agent-ctl command

FAQ

How can I test the latest major version ?

You can use a wildcard filter RHEL-{8|9}.* to download the latest available RHEL version in the topic name.

E.g. Get the latest RHEL-9 topic available in DCI:

topics:
  - name: RHEL-9.*

Where can some documentation about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle official document