mcgrof

After 3 years since the announcement of the first release of kdevops I'd like to announce the release of v6.2-rc1 of kdevops!

kdevops is designed to help with automation of Linux kernel development workflows. At first, is was not clear how and if kdevops could be used outside of filesystems testing easily. In fact my last post about it 3 years ago explained how one could only use kdevops in an odd way for other things, one had to fork it to use it for different workflows. That's old nonsense now. kdevops has grown to adopt kconfig and so in one single tree different workflows are now possible. Embracing other things such as using jinja2 for file templating with ansible and having to figure out a way to add PCI-E passthrough support through kconfig has made me realize that the growth component to the project is no longer a concern, it is actually a feature now. It is clear now that new technologies and very complex workflows can easily be added to kdevops.

But it is easy to say unless you have proof, and fortunately I have it. There are two new technologies that go well supported in kdevops that folks who are curious can start mucking around with, which otherwise may take a bit of time to ramp up with. The technologies are: Zoned storage and CXL. Supporting new technologies also means ensuring you get whatever tooling you might need to want to test or work with such technologies.

So for instance, getting a full Linux kernel development workflow going for CXL with the meson unit tests, even by enabling PCI-E passthrough, with the latest linux-next kernel is now reduced to just a few basic commands, in a Linux distribution / cloud provider agnostic manner:

make dynconfig
make
make bringup
make linux
make cxl
make cxl-test-meson

Just ask around a typical CXL Linux kernel developer how long it took them to get a CXL Linux kernel development & test environment up and running that they were happy with. And ask if it was reproducible. This is all now just reduced to 6 commands.

As for the details, it has been 8 months since the last release, and over that time the project has received 680 commits. I'd like to thank the developers who contributed:

Adam Manzanares
Amir Goldstein
Chandan Babu R
Jeff Layton
Joel Granados
Josef Bacik
Luis Chamberlain
Pankaj Raghav

I'd also like to thank my employer for trusting in this work, and allowing me to share a big iron server to help the community with Linux kernel stable work and general kernel technology enablement.

As for the exact details of changes merged, there so many! So I've tried to provide a nice terse summary on highlights on the git tag for v6.2-rc1. 8 months was certainly a long time to wait for a new release, so my hope is we'll try to bake a release now in tandem with the Linux kernel, in cadence with the same Linux kernel versioning and release timeline.

Based on feedback at LSFMM this year the project is now under the github linux-kdevops organization. This enables other developers to push into the tree. This let's us scale, specially as different workflows are supported.

If you see value in enabling rapid ramp up with Linux kernel development through kdevops for your subsystem / technology / feel free to join the party and either send a pull request to the group or just send patches.