---

title: "CentOS Connect 2024"

title_lead: "February 1, 2024 - February 2, 2024 • Brussels, Belgium"

talks:

  - title: "Hyperscale SIG update"

    youtube: YOC1mxCGAi8

    speakers:

      - name: Davide Cavalca

      - name: Neal Gompa

    desc: |

      Update on what the Hyperscale SIG has been working on, what deliverables

      are available and how to use them, and what's coming up next.

  - title: "State of EPEL"

    youtube: Jj83w4gaF40

    speakers:

      - name: Troy Dawson

    desc: |

      Troy Dawson, the EPEL Steering Committee chair, presents the State of EPEL.

      What has EPEL done, what it's currently working on, and what to expect in the future.

  - title: "EPEL 10 Overview"

    youtube: mUoI0rqWfmY

    speakers:

      - name: Carl George

    desc: |

      Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a yum repository of community

      maintained packages for use on CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

      In EPEL 9, package maintainers were able to build against CentOS Stream 9 early

      to have packages ready before the RHEL 9.0 launch.

      For EPEL 10, the EPEL Steering Committee is planning on expanding that strategy

      to all minor versions of RHEL 10.

      Attend this talk to learn more about this initiative and the progress towards it

      so far.

  - title: "AlmaLinux: How we automated testing without inventing the wheel and instead improving it"

    youtube: HgZKLs5ItH4

    speakers:

      - name: Elkhan Mammadli

    desc: |

      As the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, we take the testing seriously while pioneering

      on the speed of the delivery.

      When you have multiple major versions with the support of multiple architecutes,

      testing of a GNU/Linux distribution can be exhausting.

      One of the phase on our journey of testing was the automation.

      We will talk about the openQA and Testinfra as the technologies choice of us,

      the challenges we faced while adopting them and how we handled them with contributing

      back to upstream and Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

  - title: "Bridging the Gap: Packit automation for CentOS and upstream projects"

    youtube: Eqb6IqG7Jek

    speakers:

      - name: František Lachman

      - name: Evgeny Fedin

    desc: |

      
Are you a package maintainer striving for a seamless integration with upstream projects?

      Are you an upstream project developer aiming to ensure your software functions flawlessly

      on CentOS Stream? Look no further – Packit is your solution!

      
Since the beginning of CentOS Stream, Packit has allowed developers to execute

      CentOS Stream RPM builds directly from their upstream changes.

      But that's just the beginning – delve into the possibilities of running tmt-based tests

      on a pristine virtual machine with the newly-built RPMs installed.

      This approach enables you to identify and address potential issues as they are introduced

      to the codebase, ensuring robust and reliable software when the new code reaches the user.

      
More and more projects are using Packit to automatically synchronise upstream

      releases to Fedora. And we are pleased to announce that the very same is now

      available for CentOS Stream as well!

      
In this talk, we will guide you through the functionalities Packit brings

      to the table specifically tailored for CentOS Stream.

      Discover how you can effortlessly enhance collaboration between upstream projects

      and CentOS Stream, fostering a more efficient and reliable development process.

  - title: "Alternative Image SIG - Let's Talk About It"

    youtube: vwA4mULGiF8

    speakers:

      - name: Troy Dawson

    desc: |

      An update on the CentOS Alternative Images SIG. What are our goals.

      What progress have we made. What do we see in the near, and far future.

  - title: "Discuss your identity: how FreeIPA helps running CentOS community infrastructure"

    youtube: mIbp7GUa2KI

    speakers:

      - name: Alexander Bokovoy

    desc: |

      
It is time to gather a feedback!

      
CentOS Stream upstream and downstream communities rely on infrastructure bits

      provided by FreeIPA project. Fedora uses FreeIPA since 2017, providing the shared

      infrastructure together with the CentOS project.

      
FreeIPA team would like to hear a community feedback! At this session let us dive

      into what is working and what could be improved in CentOS community's usage of FreeIPA.

  - title: "Open Secrets of CentOS Stream"

    youtube: eQTQn61_UXo

    speakers:

      - name: Troy Dawson

    desc: |

      CentOS Stream has a goal of being as open as possible. Even though it has

      been around for several years, many people think it is still keeping secrets.

      Join Troy, from the CentOS Stream team at Red Hat, as he works through the

      whole development workflow, showing how everything is hidden in plain site.

  - title: "Promo SIG and Docs SIG Updates"

    speakers:

      - name: Shaun McCance

    desc: |

      Did you know we have SIGs for Promo and Docs? The Promo SIG has been recently

      revitalized, while Docs has finally been officially recognized as a SIG. This

      talk will showcase the work being done in both SIGs, and show you how you can

      get involved. Spoiler: we're having a working day on Monday after FOSDEM, and

      you're invited!

  - title: "Ansible usage in CentOS Infra"

    youtube: xLf8Ma94dHE

    speakers:

      - name: Fabian Arrotin

    desc: |

      CentOS Infrastructure is heavily relying on Ansible for automation.

      Let's summarize how we use it, where to find the roles, describe the modular

      approach with multiple inventories (why and how) and how we maintain these.

      Also how we use ARA to browse the ansible logs/reports.

  - title: "Building And Utilizing Purpose-Built GNU/Linux Distribution Images Using Mkosi"

    youtube: NEEqySq7uE4

    speakers:

      - name: Akashdeep Dhar

    desc: |

      Mkosi is a tool in the Systemd software suite, facilitating the creation of

      customized distribution images for various Linux bases like Fedora, Debian,

      Ubuntu, Arch, Red Hat, Rocky, Alma, Gentoo, etc. It supports multiple system

      architectures and deployment methods, offering finer control than alternatives

      like Cloud-init and Ignition, using an INI-styled format for configuration.

  - title: "How SIGs can facilitate contributions to the CentOS Stream kernel"

    youtube: pN14gOgBVlo

    speakers:

      - name: Paolo Bonzini

    desc: |

      The CentOS Stream kernel receives backports for thousands of upstream

      commits every month. In this talk, I will show how CentOS SIGs can be

      used to help testing and tracking future contributions to CentOS Stream,

      helping to structure them into multiple merge requests for the CentOS

      Stream kernel project on GitLab. The content of this talk are based on

      the experience gained when developing a TDX-enabled kernel variant within

      the Virtualization SIG.

  - title: "The self-abolition of Enterprise Linux Distributions"

    youtube: F5SWz3yPXjo

    speakers:

      - name: Dan Čermák

    desc: |

      
Enterprise Linux Distributions have been caught in a downward spiral

      for the past decade. The distributions have been steadily reducing

      their package sets, as it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain

      packages in a faster moving ecosystem. This in turn renders enterprise

      distributions less desirable as a deployment or a development target

      and especially as a workstation. There is a growing realization that

      the current release cadence and package maintenance workflow become

      less suitable for the world where workloads are run as containers

      based on non-enterprise distributions.

      
What is the way out of this? How can enterprise vendors solve the

      problem to remain relevant in a cloud native world? Will a more

      modular distribution be the solution? Or perhaps the container

      ecosystem, where everything is containerized, is the answer?

  - title: "Testing the CentOS Hyperscale systemd backport with mkosi"

    youtube: yK_7tKZLQ68

    speakers:

      - name: Daan De Meyer

    desc: |

      
The CentOS Hyperscale SIG maintains a backport of the latest systemd.

      This talk will discuss how we use mkosi to test this backport. mkosi is

      the image building sister project of systemd

      (https://github.com/systemd/mkosi).

      We'll start with a brief introduction to mkosi before moving on to discussing

      how we use it to test the backport. This involves locally building the systemd

      rpm locally from the systemd and Hyperscale systemd rpm sources within mkosi,

      building initrd and system images including the newly build systemd rpms and

      finally booting the resulting image with qemu. If there's time left, we'll

      also discuss the SELinux policy module we maintain for the systemd backport.

      
My previous talk on mkosi at ASG:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EelcbjbUa8

  - title: "Using PoI Tracker for Enterprise Linux preparedness and to audit your dependencies"

    youtube: u4ng7bdLVtA

    speakers:

      - name: Michel Lind

    desc: |

      
PoI Tracker is a tool intended to improve organizations' readiness to adopt

      the next major Enterprise Linux release, and also make it easier to track the

      packages they need - especially those community-maintained in the Extra Packages

      for Enterprise Linux repository as well as projects such as the Hyperscale SIG

      - and the dependency graph of these packages. This talk will cover both the

      rationale, the development of the tool itself, and some of its use cases.

      
In addition, having this information about not only the leaf packages organizations

      care about but also their dependencies, PoI tracker can be used to analyze the health

      of these dependencies (e.g. surfacing dependencies that have major unfixed bugs, have

      only a single maintainer) as well as their criticality (e.g. surfacing packages that

      it turns out is used by many leaf packages) - organizations can then hopefully use

      this information to invest resources in this (e.g. helping with packaging, contributing

      code fixes, or funding the development)

  - title: OpenStack RDO deployment on Community Distribution of Kubernetes (OKD)"

    youtube: LocoEPmbL4U

    speakers:

      - name: Karolina Kula

      - name: Alfredo Moralejo Alonso

    desc: |

      
During the last year a new mechanism to deploy OpenStack has been created

      in the OpenStack Kubernetes Operators project

      (https://github.com/openstack-k8s-operators/).

      In this session we are going to share update about our ongoing work on

      adopting this project for testing and deploying RDO repositories. We will

      provide a high level overview of the architecture and concepts behind this

      model and also share some ideas about CI usage and community-friendly way

      of deploy full stack RDO.

  - title: "CentOS Automotive SIG update"

    youtube: Ry54_HYwdeQ

    speakers:

      - name: Eric Curtin

      - name: Pierre-Yves Chibon

    desc: |

      
It's going to be similar to the

      CentOS Connect talk at flock,

      but with new content with updated information.

      
We will speak about newer projects such as initoverlayfs, maybe our work

      with Texas Instruments.

      
In the new year, we will meet with Red Hat Automotive people internally

      and the CentOS Automotive SIG community externally to decide what content

      we present.

  - title: "CentOS Integration SIG: current state and future plans"

    youtube: p7xiF0psQTA

    speakers:

      - name: Aleksandra Fedorova

    desc: |

      
In this talk I would like to introduce the CentOS Integration SIG.

      
We will discuss our current work, plans and possibilities how you can join and use the

      
We will discuss the current work and the possibilities how the SIG can

      help you integrate CentOS Stream in your infrastructure or develop your

      own projects on top of it.

  - title: "Provisioning hosts with Foreman"

    youtube: Wzxsz_DQyRc

    speakers:

      - name: Shimon Shtein

    desc: |

      I would like to introduce the Foreman project that deals with provisioning,

      configuration management and configuration monitoring aspects of datacenter

      management. This project allows to manage systems no matter the deployment

      architecture: physical, virtual or on-cloud. It allows a single pane of glass

      for most management aspects of the infrastructure.

  - title: Cloud SIG Update

    youtube: 1hB2mrttDmc

    speakers:

      - name: Joel Capitao

      - name: Christian Glombek

    desc: |

      Please come join the chairs of the CentOS Cloud SiG as they provide a review

      of the SiG over the past year and where the SiG is going in the next. This

      review will include information on both RDO and SCOS as the two leading

      components of the SiG but will also provide information how you and your

      cloud related project can be a part.

---

CentOS Connect is the contributor conference for CentOS,

focusing on CentOS Stream, Special Interest Groups, and the entire Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

CentOS Connect at FOSDEM happens February 1-2, 2024, as part of the FOSDEM Fringe.

{% include event.html %}