On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, John Poelstra wrote: > Greetings, > > I sat in on a session at FUDCon where there was discussion about getting > the AMIs updated to Fedora 12. Are we tracking those steps and their > status on the wiki anywhere? Can I help with that process? > > I'm also curious if we have done any work to map out what needs to > happen and when (a schedule) for Fedora 13 in terms of having Fedora 13 > AMIs ready on release day? If there is not a schedule I'd be glad to > help map one out and I'm guessing we need to start on this ASAP? > > Who is working on the different pieces right now? Let me do my best to describe where we are right now, and where we should be headed. We should be working on two separate efforts: getting the Fedora kernel sorted for EC2, and working on image build tools for EC2. ==== 1. Fedora AKI for EC2. Where we are: Chatted with Justin Forbes today briefly, and evidently we're waiting for the 2.6.32 kernel to move from updates-testing to release. The goal of the kernel work is to make sure that it actually runs properly on Xen hosts, which is what Amazon runs EC2 on. How to help: Amazon runs EC2 on many versions of RHEL. The oldest is analogous to RHEL 5.2. If you can build a (RH)EL 5.2 Xen host, and install a Fedora 12 guest built with the 2.6.32 kernel in updates-testing. Justin, any particular things to test on that guest? Is "does the damned thing boot" an effective test? Any particular set of tests? ==== 2. Compose tools for Fedora EC2 images. To some degree, this is parallel work. To complete it, we'll need a good F12 kernel -- but to get it started, we just need an overview of the current tools, figure out how they're used, document, improve if need be, and make it dead-easy for Fedora users to do what they want to do. I think a lot of people have ideas of what we *could* do, but we've yet to articulate what we *will* do. My $0.02: seems like thincrust might be a good place to start. Red Hat folks have been working on it for a while, and I've liked my initial experiences with it. It's dead easy to go from kickstart file to virtual image, and they've also got a tool called ec2-converter that allegedly sets up AMI images that are ready for upload. Maybe the place to start is to take a current spin and walk down the path of turning it into an AMI, and see how far we get. (Copying Joey Boggs, who is the maintainer of ec2-converter: any advice? Gotchas?) The goal should be to have a handful of F13 AMIs very shortly after the F13 release. ==== 3. IRC meetings. This "roadmap", such as it is, is very high-level. I wonder if perhaps we should convene an IRC meeting this week and figure out who's willing to jump in and help. At the very least, we can articulate some tasks at a more granular level, and maybe get some folks to pick them up. So... um... Thursday at 1900GMT / 1400 Eastern US time? I've got #fedora-cloud registered on freenode. We could hang out, put together a roadmap... you know, junk like that. Any takers? Any counter-proposals? --g -- Educational materials should be high-quality, collaborative, and free. Visit http://opensource.com/education and join the conversation.
