Now that we're nearing the finish line for the 3.0 ASL release, there has been some time for those of us that are not gifted with user interface design skills to focus on some much needed back end updates & feature completion. The first major project was to get the Kernel build system into a much less manual state.

Previously the update process here involved some moderate package updates and major by-hand kernel testing & module building in virtual machines. The whole thing literally took days of building, testing, booting and rebooting kernels and one-off builders. It was bad. Embarrisingly bad for someone that claims to be a packager.  Not to mention any time you do unmanaged (ie source) builds you're just increasing the risk possibilities.

At any rate, that is now complete and might I say... awesome. I love build automation... and I love packaging automation even more. Our new system spawns virtual machines automatically, does slews of tests, bundles the rpms, and puts them where they need to be for signing and final distribution. Major time saver, more repeatable, and fewer build defects.

A good friend of mine once gave me a great way to measure the the maturity of a product development team: Ask a random developer to do a build for you.  Needless say the right answer is that you should be able to do it on the spot (repeatably!).

This all adds up to the 2.6.32.41 kernel update. Sadly the 500K+ changelog is too much to post so I saved a copy here:

https://www.atomicorp.com/Changelog-kernel

So the big news with .41 is we now support Xen as a guest. Xen has some funny name for guests that I can never remember.... Rather add to their meme, I'll just call it a guest like I call everything else that uses virtualization: Guests are OS's running under the Master OS. Simple, neh?

The next major project we'll be tackling here is to get openvz support as a master (meaning you can run openvz containers under it), and get some deeper QA in place around tools like ganeti, virtuozzo, libvirt and archipel.