Thanks for raising this, Jim. I'm happy to help convert and maintain the Rocky and CentOS Stream images, at least. I'll try to find some others to help, too! --Neil On 17.04.2025 09:44, James E. Blair wrote:
Hi,
The OpenDev community needs volunteers to help with the maintenance of the following images, otherwise we may need to remove them from Zuul:
* CentOS Stream (x86 and Arm) * Rocky Linux (x86 and Arm) * Ubuntu (Arm only) * Debian (Arm only)
The preceding images are all active and in use; the following images do not currently build and without further action are already slated to be removed:
* openEuler * Gentoo
The Zuul project is nearing the end of an effort to update the way that it launches nodes when running tests. This promises to bring a number of benefits to OpenDev users, including better responsiveness, availability, scaling, and more end-user control over the configuration.
In short, we are removing Nodepool as a standalone project and incorporating all of its functionality into Zuul itself.
OpenDev currently builds the base images we use for test nodes using nodepool-builder, which is a standalone daemon running on a small number of dedicated hosts which runs diskimage-builder and uploads the results to the clouds we use. This approach ensures a consistent image across the many clouds that we employ, plus effective caching of content used in jobs.
The configuration for these image builds is, as is standard for every part of OpenDev, public and changes to it are able to be proposed by any member of our community. Yet there is limited testing of those changes, and new image builds can only happen after configuration changes are merged and deployed.
With the new system, image builds will happen in Zuul jobs, which makes it far easier to observe the builds and examine the results.
Most importantly, any changes to the image configuration are entirely self-testing.
Which leads us to the request for volunteers. We have already copied over and adapted the x86 Debian and Ubuntu images to the new system. But we need someone with knowledge of Arm, CentOS, and Rocky images to port the old configuration to the new system. It's not a lot of work, but from time to time these images do need updates (for new OS releases, for example), so it's important that we have a community of users who are able to assist in that maintenance.
If no volunteers are willing to help maintain this community resource, we may need to remove support for these images. Starting around May 15, we would consider these images best-effort: we may not run them in all providers as we move more of our workload to zuul-launcher. Jobs that use them may start to fail with NODE_ERROR. Later, once we finish the move to zuul-launcher (tentatively July 1), any request for nodes without images would return NODE_ERROR.
Along with myself, others in the OpenDev community are willing to assist anyone who is interested in working on this. It is an excellent opportunity to get involved in helping to support the community: it requires no previous knowledge of OpenDev systems or any special access.
If you are willing to port the nodepool-builder configuration for these images to the new Zuul system, please let us know (by either responding to this thread on service-discuss, or contacting us in OFTC in #opendev). Here are some relevant links to get you started:
The current nodepool-builder configuration:
https://opendev.org/openstack/project-config/src/branch/master/nodepool/node...
The new zuul-launcher configuration:
https://opendev.org/opendev/zuul-providers/src/branch/master/zuul.d/image-bu...
Thanks in advance,
-Jim (on behalf of the OpenDev project)