Spotlighting the Rocky Linux Community

CIQ YouTube channel (@CtrlIQ)

video_id: 5qVUqGobDrk video_duration: 3270 video_upload_date: '2022-08-12'

This live discussion will spotlight the Rocky Linux team leads and community members. Rocky Linux was created for the community, by the community.

We love hearing from you! The Rocky Linux experts will be answering your questions live throughout the discussion. 

Webinar Synopsis:

• Neil Hanlon and Rocky Linux Infrastructure

• Rocky Linux and HPC

• Skip Grube and Rocky Linux Development

• Rocky Linux Documentation

• Sherif Nagy as Rocky Linux' Administrator

• Wale Soyinka's Introduction

• Gregory Kurtzer's Rocky Linux Work

• How Big is the Rocky Linux Community Today?

• What Makes RESF Different From Other Projects?

• What Makes Rocky Linux Interesting and Different From Other Work?

• What Makes the Rocky Linux Community So Great?

• Are There Any Big Challenges In a Project the Size of Rocky Linux?

• Is The Rocky Linux Team Bringing Back Monthly Community Updates?

• How Can People Get Involved With Rocky Linux?

• When Will More Rocky Linux Documentation Be Available?

• What Is Next on the Horizon For Rocky Linux?

• Rocky Linux and Peridot Integration

• What Is Next For The Rocky Linux Community?

• The Future of Rocky Linux Sustainability

• Expanded CPU Architecture Support For Rocky Linux

• Peridot and RISC-V Support

Speakers:

• Zane Hamilton, Vice President Sales Engineering, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Neil Hanlon, Infrastructure Lead, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Steve Spencer, Documentation Team Deputy, RESF

  • Linkedin

• **Skip Grube,** Senior Linux Engineer, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Gregory Kurtzer, Founder and CEO, CIQ

  • Linkedin

• Sherif Nagy, Administrator, Rocky Linux

  • Linkedin

• Wale Soyinka, Documentation Team Lead, RESF

  • Linkedin

• **Chris Stackpole,** Testing Team Lead, RESF

  • Linkedin

---

Note: This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

Full Webinar Transcript:

Zane Hamilton:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. We appreciate you joining us again for another CIQ webcast. This week we're going to spend some time really focusing on the Rocky and the Rocky community. So I'd like to bring in who we have on from the Rocky Community. How are you guys?

Neil Hanlon:

Doing well, yourself?

Zane Hamilton:

How's it going? I'm sure we'll have some more trickles in, but to get started, I think I want to have you guys introduce yourselves, tell us who you are, how you're involved with the community, and how you got involved in the community. Kinda that why did you start doing this? And I'm going to start off. I'm going to go left to right. So, Neil, will you start off?

Neil Hanlon:

Left to right? I thought I was on the right. I guess it

Zane Hamilton:

Depends, you're on my right. Sorry, I'm backwards today.

Neil Hanlon and Rocky Linux Infrastructure [00:46]

Neil Hanlon:

I think you just want to pick on me Zane. Neil. My name is Neil Hanlon. I wear a few hats when one of those hats is one of the team leads for infrastructure at the Rocky Linux Project inside of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. The other hat I wear is as a solutions architect or something along those lines at CIQ, who's a sponsor and partner of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation as well. But yeah, I wear those two hats. And I got involved in Rocky right at the beginning. I think around the same time most of the team leads here did or the folks that might be trickling in who make up the team leads got, and I joined here from Greg's comment on a blog post.

I was going into the December season and figured I needed a little bit of something to do and joined Slack at the time and found myself somehow being responsible for figuring out how to build infrastructure to support a massive community of folks that were, at the beginning, honestly angry. And that was a vibe that we had to quiet down cause there was a lot of anger and a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of people's parts. And so we got through that and I got involved, like I said, honestly, because I was a user of CentOS in my job and in my personal time my prior place of employment and understood the benefits for the Enterprise Linux community that a free operating system like CentOS Linux used to be an CentOS stream as it exists now, but specifically sent to us where it sits or there's hat after Red Hat. The benefits of those are very large and numerous for enterprises that run on Red Hat Linux or various el operating systems. So that's how I got involved and kinda why I got involved was to fill a need that I saw in the community. And for, again, as I said, like where I was working at the time.

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thank you. Neil. Stack, how do you go next?

Rocky Linux and HPC [03:17]

Stack:

I'm Stack. I've been in the HPC space now for 20 years. And so I've been working with scientific Linux before. And so when the announcement came out I'd already been looking at moving because Scientific Linux said they weren't going to do anything past 7.0. So we'd already been looking at moving to CentOS 8.0 when the announcement came out through the HPC space. I know Greg and have worked with Greg for a number of years, so when he made the announcement, I was like, let me know how I can help. There was a need at the time for somebody to help with testing. So I stepped up in that role. And now I'm the testing lead. Previously I worked with Trevor in that role, but he's recently stepped down. Life gets in that way. But we've got quite the amazing team in testing who do I think the bulk of the work. I just help run the meetings and wrangle them, to focus on tickets. So. 

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thank you very much. Steve. I'm going to stop. Let's drop down to the bottom. Bottom right. Introduce yourself.

Steve Spencer:

Yeah, I actually got involved back in December, 2020 basically.

Skip Grube:

Steve. You gotta, you gotta turn your mic up, man.

Zane Hamilton:

Really quiet. Yeah, Steve.

Steve Spencer:

Oh, really?

Skip Grube:

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Spencer:

Mike is on. It's not working.

Skip Grube:

No, it's on, we can hear you. It's working. Turn up that volume. Oh, turn up that volume. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Spencer:

You want to come back to me?

Zane Hamilton:

That'll work. We'll just skip to skip.

Skip Grube:

Oh, no, I already, I

Zane Hamilton:

Volunteering to go. Yeah, no, you're good.

Skip Grube and Rocky Linux Development [05:06]

Skip Grube:

I'm very much like Neil except more on the development side of things. I've been working as a Linux admin architect. I worked with CentOS and Red Hat Linux for a long time in and out, mostly in the server space. And yeah, I was really shocked and surprised to hear this big CentOS announcement. Checked it out, read the tech news, checked out the blog post, and saw the comment. I was like, oh, let me curiously click on here. And I just remember hopping into the initial, I think Greg had co-opted the high performance computing Slack channel, and I hopped in there. It was like, I had never really used Slack a couple of times before and there were like 5,000 people in this, like, and they were all like, you let's go do something. Let's do something. So we had to quickly organize ourselves and it snowballed from there, quite frankly. So really my role in the Rocky Development Group is not really on the infrastructure side. It's more on package builds, troubleshooting and also doing some of the Raspberry PI portage stuff and all kinds of i and outs. Little bit of programming work, but yeah, I'm just all over the place. So developers at large, in and out little bit.

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah. Great. Thank you. Steve, you want to try again?

Steve Spencer:

How's that? Is that better?

Zane Hamilton:

A little bit, a little bit better. It's a little quiet, but it's better.

Steve Spencer:

I can always crank it up some more.

Zane Hamilton:

Try a little more, if you don't mind.

Steve Spencer:

How about now?

Zane Hamilton:

There we go.

Rocky Linux Documentation [06:52]

Steve Spencer:

Okay. All right. I got started probably December 2020 as I was preparing to retire from my day job I've been at for 21 years. I was a network administrator for a small home owned, basically plumbing and electrical supply company that had an internet service and web hosting. And we actually provided Linux terminal service to our remotes, which was how I really got embedded in Linux, the Linux world. But all of our servers were Linux based and we used CentOS or CentOS for all of that. So I was very familiar with that. And so when I got involved, I wasn't really sure how I wanted to be involved. And I got started with the documentation team and wrote a fair amount of documentation and still am very active there basically with the translation group as well. And so that's, that's how I got involved. I retired.

Zane Hamilton:

That's fantastic. Congratulations. Hopefully someday we can all get there. Thank you, Steven. So Sherif, I'll move to you next.

Sherif Nagy as Rocky Linux' Administrator [08:19]

Sherif Nagy:

Hello. So my name is Sherif. I've been Linux's administrator for maybe 17 or 18 years now. Mainly working with Red Hat based operating systems and Debian. And one day I saw the regs comment on the CentOS blog post for Rocky. And as most people here, I just jumped into the slack. I see, okay, how can I help? I've always been involved in open source communities here and even back home. And yeah, first I started with the release engineering team. We were trying to configure and build MBS and Koji and the older build infrastructure, which was an awful process. But yeah, we got it done. We got through that Rocky, out of the way. And then I got dragged into the wonderful world of Secure Boot. And mainly this is what I've been doing lately. So, secure Boot, I'm working a little bit on the side for the generic ARM64 imaging. And now the ARM HFP Rocky bootstrapping is another colleague of ours, Pablo from CIQ as well.

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thank you, Sherif. Thank you, Wale. You're next.

Wale Soyinka's Introduction [09:48]

Wale Soyinka:

My name is Wale Soyinka. I don't have a cool backstory, like all of these folks here but if Greg's throwing the party, I'm there. That's it. That's all I need to know. Greg's doing something now. I'm there. Sign me up. Yes. So my name is Wale again. I work with all of these fine folks here. That's my twin in the corner there. You probably wouldn't see it. That's Steven. That's my twin. That's my identical twin, so. Awesome. That's it.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you. And right now, there are just a few more people that are waiting in the wings here, but I guess I'll go to Greg next.

Not sure. How'd you get involved? Who are you?

Gregory Kurtzer's Rocky Linux Work [10:34]

Gregory Kurtzer:

I don't know anymore. So yeah, so in terms of how I got involved I saw this blog post that CentOS was going EOL, and they were moving it towards CentOS Stream, which is a fantastic project. A project, we're really excited about it, but it's not exactly what we needed as an organization. I know our customers didn't really want that. And I was looking at a lot of the other comments on that blog post where it seemed like nobody was really happy about it. And so I mean, I gotta say I've always thought about redoing and recreating another operating system. So it felt like this was just the perfect opportunity. And so I made just a little comment saying I'm interested in making another CentOS, if anyone was interested, come over to this slack over here and, and join.

And next thing I know, I had 10,000 new closest friends and within like two months, I think I spent many more months than that, just trying to answer messages as they were coming in of people who wanted to help and wanted to be part of it. And it was amazing, like I've been doing open source for a long time. Like, I don't know, I'm old, right? So I've been doing open source for a long time, since like the mid nineties. And I've seen so many underground uprising movements and open source where there were whole communities just coming out of the woodwork and just disrupting everything and just doing amazing things. Honestly, I gotta say, I didn't know that that was still capable. And I felt I always wished that a lot of other people that are new to open source had the opportunity to see what that, what that was like.

Because it was so amazing to be part of such things. And then Rocky happened, and I never thought in a million years that we'd see an open source uprising like we did again with Rocky. And all of a sudden, I mean, literally within like a month and a half, two months, I mean, there were 10,000 people in the community all wanting to be part of this and all wanting to help and jump in. And yeah, so that's how I got involved. And ever since, it's just been, it's been absolutely incredible is the way I would describe it. And I hope everyone that has been part of what we've created feels the same because I look back at my memories of o other open source projects earlier on, and it's so powerful to just know that I was there, I saw that sort of thing develop, I saw it happen. I may have even been able to take part in some of that. And I hope that everybody that's associated with Rocky today and everybody who comes and joins us in the future gets that same opportunity and can perpetuate that moving forward. Anyway, blah. I'm getting emotional, so hopefully that's.

Zane Hamilton:

It's fantastic. You alluded to one thing that I wanted to ask though is, you started off around 10,000 people that are interested. How big is the community today? Or can we even measure that anymore?

How Big is the Rocky Linux Community Today? [13:51]

Gregory Kurtzer:

I don't know. I've got, I've got my perspective, but I want other you guys to come in over me after, because this started off with, everybody here knows me real well. I talk a lot, so you guys can shut up if you need to. But this started off, as I said, with so many people, it's impossible to manage 10,000 people within like a month with no organizational structure. It's just impossible. Can't be done. If somebody else knows how to do it, teach me. What we did was we basically decided to create a whole bunch of different channels in our Slack, and we divided up the channels by topics and groups and interests and whatnot. And we made a whole bunch of them. Some of them, nobody was interested in other ones.

We had a lot of discussions. And as I'm trying to like jump through like all of these different things and different topics and whatnot we're seeing all of this happen and it's like immediately like people and teams started to form and people started to start making progress and start moving forward. And I'm watching all of this and I'm like, okay, as soon as I finish with these 300 responses to messages that I need to get to, I'm looking forward to jumping in. Finally, I get through like all of this after like a month or two of trying to respond to everybody. Finally I get onto that and I'm looking at the development team and they're describing to me how it works. And, all of a sudden I realized how legacy all of my knowledge is and how irrelevant so much of that knowledge has become over the last 18 to 20 years.

And so this team was just doing such a phenomenal job. The best thing that I can do is really just help them with everything else and stay out of their way. And that's what I did. So it's been, again, it's been a fantastic journey. Oh, your question, yes. How many people? So hard to say because each one of the teams have a number. There's team members, there's team leaders, there's deputies, and then there's a bunch of contributors into each one of these teams. So at a high level view I'd say probably, it's in the hundreds in terms of people that are actively contributing and being part of what we're doing. But not all of those people are committing code is what I would describe.

So it's a much smaller number in terms of who is committing code, but we're actually starting several initiatives where we're trying to grow this and expand who actually has access and come up with mechanisms for additional people to get access and to join what it is that we're doing. But the one thing that's incredibly important to everything that we're doing is that this is in fact the community doing this. And it's not CIQ, it's not another single company. It's a lot of individuals. It's a lot of different companies represented and we're making sure that we have checks and balances in place such that that always is going to be the case. And we do not, as a matter of fact, we're redrafting some of our charters and whatnot right now where we literally cannot have a single company represent what it is that we're doing. So yeah. Anyway, long story short I'll be quiet now.

Wale Soyinka:

Thanks. Zane, did Greg actually answer that question?

Zane Hamilton:

Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. I'll have to go back and replay it later.

Wale Soyinka:

And see. So in MatterMost, we're I think total with all the channels we're probably, we're over 8,000. But we do have other channels, other forums, I don't have those numbers but matter most that I can see easily, but over 8,000 in MatterMost.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Zane, is that what you were asking?

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah, just easy numbers.

Neil Hanlon:

And a quick anecdote was we recently found out about a default limit in MatterMost, which is the chat platform we use. And that there's a preconfigured setting in the database for the maximum number of users that can be on a team. And so got a report in the morning that they couldn't register and join the chat because we had reached the maximum number of users. And it's confusing because there was, we have a like 10,000 user license and I looked and there were only about 7,500 users registered. And then I go through and find the setting in the database and some documentation on it and we just, we just cranked that up to 11 and called it today. But so that shows at least some of the growing pains that we've seen and had to deal with.

Zane Hamilton:

So even though in MatterMost, you have 10,000 seats, you still have to go compare the database separately. It's good enough.

Neil Hanlon:

I think it's probably a scam. I don't know. I don't know.

Wale Soyinka:

I like to think we put it to the limit.

What Makes RESF Different From Other Projects? [19:09]

Zane Hamilton:

There you go. Load testing. So what makes the RESF different from other projects other than size? How is this different from the way other open source projects are run? Or what makes them different? This one is different.

Gregory Kurtzer:

I'm being quiet, you guys. You guys gotta answer this again.

Neil Hanlon:

Can we just mute him preemptively?

Gregory Kurtzer:

Of course. I'll mute me. Don't worry. I got it. I'll do it. I'll do it. Don't worry. I'll be quiet.

Neil Hanlon:

I want to make someone else speak too. Cause I feel like I've talked too much.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Zane, you should just pick people.

Zane Hamilton:

I'm going to. I'm just going to go back to Wale. What makes it different?

Wale Soyinka:

Ooh. Well, a big part of what we are and what we pride ourselves on is the community. The community, community, community. That's a big part of what we do. It's a big driver for us getting up every day and doing the work. And the interactions, the respects, the mutual respect that people give to each other in the community, helping people, answering questions that's a big part. And that's a big part for me too.

Zane Hamilton:

That's awesome. Thank you. Steven, you are out of retirement for this, so what made it different enough for you to be interested to stick around?

Steve Spencer:

Oh, absolutely.

Zane Hamilton:

Be a part of this.

What Makes Rocky Linux Interesting and Different From Other Work? [20:37]

Steve Spencer:

Absolutely. I mean, honestly, I needed something to keep my tech mind happy. And that is something I'm doing every day. I've gotten, I think I mentioned this earlier, but I've gotten heavily involved with the localization team, which would be translations. And honestly, they've provided me with enough new challenges that I've never dealt with before that I'm stretching myself every day. So I think it's a great project and I'm pretty passionate about documentation as Wale will tell you. And so being involved in that aspect of it has helped me continue that as I move forward. So

Stack:

I'll jump in and I'll say that. Yeah, absolutely. I fully agree. The community is fantastic. There's a lot of interesting technical challenges that I wouldn't have worked on before.

Sorry. The other thing is I really appreciate that, as a community, we're really pushing for everything we do to be public and out in the open. But with the exception of passwords and stuff we're publishing all of our code, we're publishing, we're helping other people set up test rigs and configure stuff using code that we've written so that they can spin their own version. We're really also engaged in trying to give back to some of the open source projects that we've pulled from and contributing code upstream to various groups. I really appreciate that aspect. And I know that we're still working on the board foundation for the RESF, but I really do like the way that that's coming together. And I think that when we do make that announcement and we dump it all out, I think that'll set us apart even further for being, you know, an umbrella for being able to host other open source projects more so than just Rocky. But I really like the direction the community's going. I really like the direction the project's going, and I like the fact that it is also very community focused.

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thank you. Sherif, what makes it different to you?

Sherif Nagy:

It's the community, to be honest. The community's great. They are very supportive. The amount of knowledge that I'm still learning and absorbing at this age now is still quite a lot. And yeah, it's a very enjoyable experience in general. And on the other hand, I see it as something really helpful for other Linux users that you have more choice. You are not just having CentOS or whatever other Distro, there is one more that is open source free available. There is big community support behind it. So if you want to move to Rocky, you can move to Rocky if you want to. Yeah, basically the people for me.

Zane Hamilton:

Great.

Wale Soyinka:

Thank you. Yeah, I want to add something to what Sherif just said, and build on that. So there's a thing in MatterMost where you can bookmark or comment like when somebody says something, you can bookmark it or you bookmark a thread. So every time I see something, I'm building on the learning thing that Sherif mentioned. So every time I see something in MatterMost, especially in the general channel, I don't know that. Like bookmark it. And now my thing in MatterMost where they call it, I think they call it a saved post, it's just long now.

Skip Grube:

Is there a limit on that? We might find it.

Wale Soyinka:

So now I need a new system to bookmark that stuff because I'm just constantly seeing things that I didn't know, I had no idea about. And I'm just, I keep from, and, this is from different folks. Like, oh, this is how you do this. Oh, this is how I do this. So that alone is priceless for me.

Zane Hamilton:

It's fantastic. Thank you. Skip, what makes it different for you?

Skip Grube:

I'm just going to say two technical related things, and they're related to each other. The first is, as Whale was saying, in the chat platform in MatterMost. And as well on our forums, and mailing lists, and Reddit threads, and all this other stuff. From what I've seen, the amount of brain power that can be wielded on these platforms is incredible to me. I've said this before, but I would put it up against any commercial support in the world. It may not work exactly on your time. You might have to be patient for a couple hours or something, but oh my gosh, there's just, so I'm going to say there's gotta be a million man years of experience and all kinds of different things.

We have, from embedded all the way up to supercomputers, somebody's done something related to what you're asking about and they know all about it. And the other thing I was going to say is related to expertise and especially technical expertise. And it was early on in the project, and I think I was, I worked as a Linux admin, and my boss was talking to some people and introducing me and was like, oh yeah, here's Skip. He's our absolute expert. He knows everything there is to know about this Linux stuff and all the hosting. And I had just, I was about five months into the Rocky project working with the dev team at this point, and I'm quite frankly kind of the junior member.

And I was looking at him, I was like, oh, honey, you don't know. You have no idea. This is you. I'm just Skip. I know nothing compared to these guys. So those are two, that was just really incredible to me, the amount of on short notice, even like this whole thing was thrown together, you know? And like we had a project up and running within T minus like 48 hours of Hey, let's go do something. And everyone's like, okay, let's go. And so, it was just shocking to me how quickly that all came together and how much brain power is harnessed for good, basically. And it took us like a week for kickoff and then we were off and running. So.

Zane Hamilton:

That's fantastic. Thanks, Skip. Alright, Greg.

Gregory Kurtzer:

Call your boss.

Neil Hanlon:

Oh, no, no, don't let him go. I have to go.

Gregory Kurtzer:

No, it's the Oh Honey thing. I mean.

Skip Grube:

No, that was my thought. It was literally my thought. I didn't say to take two of 'em, but I was just like, oh man, you have no idea. Like, you think, it was funny. Like, seriously, that was my thing. Like, oh, Jesus. Yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

That's awesome.

What Makes the Rocky Linux Community So Great? [27:51]

Neil Hanlon:

I yeah, I really do want to echo what Skip said about like, the hive mind, as we sometimes call it. That's available in, not just the Rocky community, but there's a channel on Libera.Chat. The EL community, and there's also an EL-beginners channel that we're trying to start for folks that are new to Enterprise Linux. And putting that out as a distribution agnostic community that is even more of a hive mind with people that have been with the CentOS project and SUSE projects and various other distribution projects for years and years and years that know a lot of things and want to share that knowledge with other people. So there's a small subset of that in the Rocky community that I absolutely love. And that's one of the things that absolutely makes it different.

And as many of the others said, I think Chris in particular, there's just never a shortage of new challenges, whether they're professional or technical. And that's something, I've never worked in open source like this before, outside of maybe some poll requests and some various repositories that have a GitHub account. And so all of those things that keep me learning and keep me interested in doing more and finding out how to do things better and Wale, like, I also have bookmarks of things that I want to go and do and learn and document and figure out at some point in the future. So it's a never ending fire hose of not just information, but new experiences and challenges and ways to go about things and figure things out. That's the really big thing for me.

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you, Neil. Greg, you've been a part of a lot of different projects. You've been doing this for a long time. What makes this one different?

Gregory Kurtzer:

I would honestly just say the same thing. Repeat what everybody else has said. The community and the people involved. This team is remarkable. As I mentioned, I Had full intentions and I actually figured I was going to be building packages, I was going to be building infrastructure and whatnot. I gotta say compared to Skip's point. Oh honey, you have no idea how happy I am that this team is so much further ahead of me than I am because what we were able to do is so absolutely remarkable. I mean not to sound cliche, but we've made history in a manner of speaking. I mean, this is such a big deal. And again, this team came together. It was an absolute meritocracy and everybody who is here with us on these teams absolutely deserves the credit. For everything that's been done, it is so far beyond anything that I could have done that I'm just in awe of this community in this group, not to mention we're all totally cool. And if anybody ever wants to join this party, come and join chat. Linux.org.

Zane Hamilton:

That's fantastic. Thanks, Greg. So I know that managing a project like this in the community at the size of it is not easy. I know there's going to be technical challenges, and I would like you guys to discuss, what are the challenges of doing something like this? And one of the things that I think of first, outside of just the technical challenges, and I know Neil, you and I have talked about this before, but I've gotta ask Steven, from a documentation perspective, and Wale, how in the world do you keep up with documentation on a project like this with that many people, this many moving parts? It's gotta be hard.

Steve Spencer:

It's a good question. Honestly, we have a fair number of people in the MatterMost channel for documentation. And if you want the truth of the matter, there are very few that are actually contributing docs. And I think we've talked about this from the other teams, that when it comes right down to it, our biggest challenge is actually getting people other than me and a handful of other people to actually write documentation. And there are so many things that I'm not familiar with that other people would have the knowledge for, and writing those documents would be something that would be right up their alley. But I can write what I know, but we need people that will write the other things, the things that I don't know, or the things that Wale doesn't know.

And I think that the biggest challenge for documentation at least, is participation. And I think a lot of it is intimidation. People get intimidated by the thought that, oh, I can't do that, or I don't have the talent or skill to get that done, and that's just wrong. We've tried to make it as easy for them to participate as possible, and we try to make their contributions the most important thing when they come online. So that's one of our biggest challenges as far as the documentation team is concerned, is getting more community involvement. And that's what we hope to get from things like this, from these meetings, from these experiences. Wale, I'll let you pick up from there.

Wale Soyinka:

Oh, I think you've covered most of it, and I just have to give a big shout out to the folks that are contributing in the documentation group. We would be nothing without them. Anton, Jim Katz, Ezekiel, Steven, how do you say that name?

Steve Spencer:

Franco or?

Wale Soyinka:

Franco? Yes. I was going by his MatterMost handle. Yes. So those folks are just, they are just rock stars, all of them. They just do the stuff and they just make the work so easy and of course, Steven, they just make the work so easy and a lot of fun too. So yes, a few people are doing the work, but they make it so easy for everybody else. So.

Are There Any Big Challenges In a Project the Size of Rocky Linux? [34:19]

Zane Hamilton:

Yeah, it always seems like documentation is something that lacks in most projects in general. I mean, in the Enterprise and Corporate world as well. It seems to be the last thing that gets done, and a lot of times it doesn't get done at all. So, it's amazing to me that you can keep up at all. I mean, things change so fast. Neil, again, you and I have talked about this about challenges and things that are out there at scale. So what do you see as some of those big challenges in a project like this?

Neil Hanlon:

Well, for me personally with the infrastructure team, a lot of what we're blocked by is the need to keep certain pieces of information more private and other pieces of information public. And so trying to design systems and infrastructure as code in ways that we can engage the community and people can feel as though they are not only feel as though, but feel as though and actually be contributing in a meaningful way to our infrastructure projects. So that's what I've been doing a lot of thinking and working around this year. And working to get to the, hopefully execution and RFC stages soon with the community to get to a place where we're more involved in the community. And personally that technically is one of the most difficult challenges that I face right now.

Is The Rocky Linux Team Bringing Back Monthly Community Updates? [35:45]

Zane Hamilton:

Thank you, Neil. We do have a question, comment from Sylvie. Hello, Rocky team. So, hello guys. Can you bring back the monthly and quarterly updates to the community to keep us up to date on what's going on?

Stack:

I'd say, I think we're working on it. At least I know we've got a few people we're trying to help rope in with some of that, especially with how busy we've been with the eight, six, and nine releases. We could use more help. So if you are interested in that and have the ability to do some write-ups from team reports to give some just make it a pretty little report for all the technical stuff that we do that would be a huge help inter inter working with like different social media and things of that nature. That's a way that we're looking for help. And I know we've got at least a couple of hints as to some people that we're trying to pull into it. But I'm not sure where that process is for all of them. But yes, that is something we've talked about the last couple of team meetings that's come up.

How Can People Get Involved With Rocky Linux? [36:51]

Zane Hamilton:

Like if somebody's interested in that type of role or helping do that, who should they reach out to specifically to just make it quick.

Gregory Kurtzer:

So actually let me jump in on that part because we've actually, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the process for bringing in people from the community and expanding our teams. We have a bunch of documents that we're actually writing right now. I alluded to them already. Charter, bylaws updating, all of this board structures, and all of this. And the goal as part of this is to give somebody who's just just noticing our what we've done and decides they want to be part of this community. Give and provide a path that is clearly defined and outlined for anybody in the community to say, okay, I want to get involved. I want to talk to them. Join MatterMost, start chatting with people. Start choosing some teams that you may want to contribute to create the mechanisms for how somebody contributes. Create the mechanisms for how people can sponsor other people, such that we can now have a committer. So you can go from a contributor to a committer. From a committer, you can continue on this process all the way to the point where you literally could end up as a chair on a board. So that whole process is very important for me to make sure that anybody in the world can come and be part of what it is that we're creating and add value to this.

When Will More Rocky Linux Documentation Be Available? [38:18]

Zane Hamilton:

So Greg, since I'd love to ask this question of, well it's kinda my job. What's the timeline on that? Like, when can people expect to see that and where can they expect to see that.

Gregory Kurtzer:

End of month is the goal to get it out there? Give us a little of a buffer of a couple weeks, so we should probably see it, I'd say, by the latest, in 30 days.

Zane Hamilton:

And then where would they be looking for that when it comes out? Or is it going to go out on the mailing list?

Gregory Kurtzer:

That will go out, there'll be an announcement on it, on the announcement mailing list. There'll be announcements in MatterMost about it. And it will also be married and replicated on our main page as well as an FAQ, in case because creating legal documents. I'm not sure if anyone has done this or gone through the process. They get long and they get complicated and hard and not fun to read unless you are a lawyer. So we're actually going to also plan on having an FAQ that will summarize some of the key points in this. So you can very easily do a TLDR on these, these multi pages of legalese.

Zane Hamilton:

Skip, you don't like just sitting around reading legal documents. It's not a hobby of yours.

Skip Grube:

How classified are they? Doesn't matter. Yeah, no, that's, I think FAQ and I might even, I've talked to some community members, we might even delve through it and spin up a funny translation of the yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

Translate this for me.

Skip Grube:

Love making a mockery of legal documents. Awesome.

What Is Next on the Horizon For Rocky Linux? [39:57]

Zane Hamilton:

So one of the, one of the last things I want to ask you guys, and this is for everyone, I'll go around and start with you Stack on this one is what do you see is next? What's on the horizon for Rocky Linux?

Stack:

Well, since I'm on the testing team, we're focusing on how we can better deal with that and how to better engage the community because we do have quite a few people who are interested. And when we have a new release, even a, hey, it worked for me, is sufficient to give some feedback on things moving forward. But to have a framework where people can say, oh, well this actually didn't work for me. We actually are looking for people to help out with especially weird hardware. We don't have a whole lot of people who have like a bunch of different RAID cards, for example. So when we're trying to test to make sure that everything's working, having somebody who's got that experience is a huge benefit.

But we also have things like XOS reports which are fairly easy for people to run this command against their system and give us some feedback as to how well it's working and just the fact that we have some sort of metric. And so but when we have 9.1 or 8.7 or 10.0, how do we help organize and collect all this information? So we're putting a lot of thought process into going through the release. How do we make sure we have our go no go set up properly? How do we track information especially when there is a break. Is it something that we did or is it actually a bug that is upstream? And trying to figure out all that. We made it through the 8.6 and 9.0, but there were a lot of lessons learned and things that we were trying to think of how to do better. So when I think about what's next on the horizon, it's how do we do a better job of testing and integrating with the community to get feedback especially when things aren't working the way that they expect.

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thank you, Neil.

Rocky Linux and Peridot Integration [42:11]

Neil Hanlon:

Thanks. Well, the thing I'm super excited about right now is having Peridot in the open, in a way that folks can come and interact and we're actively working on documentation. Skip is doing great work on documentating, that's a word.

Zane Hamilton:

Documentating, I love it.

Neil Hanlon:

Documenting the architecture around Peridot, how it does, what it does, and what it is that it is, as well as how to set it up on like your machine and get it running and, and build a package with it. So the possibilities for us to enable the community to build packages in special interest groups and get them released onto the operating system is really something that is going to enable the community to interact in the ways that Greg was describing to be able to work on your package and commit it and have it go through a GitOPs type workflow and be approved and sent to the mirrors where folks can use it. And we're using that today in some of our projects, like we have a cloud special interest group that focuses on maintaining and enhancing different parts of the operating system for cloud usage on AnyCloud, Azure, GCP, Amazon, et cetera.

So there's a custom kernel that has some tweaks so it can run better on ARM with a different page size it back-ports some drivers from the mainline kernel for Google's gVNIC drivers. So it can interact directly with the hardware there and get great performance on GCP. And there's some other tweaks that we're looking to investigate for other operating systems, or, sorry, other cloud operating system vendors where we can enable tweaks and tuning to help them perform their best on those clouds. And that's a really cool initiative that we've been able to take into the community and work on there with Peridot enabling that. Outside of that, I'm working to get Stack and the testing teams some infrastructure so they can do some automated builds as well and do regression testing against the operating system so that we can have some much better understanding from an automatic sense of if the updates that we're pushing out are well constructed and work well to go up out on the public internet instead of the manual testing that we're doing right now.

So a lot of things to automate and help facilitate the release of the updates and, and features that we release.

Zane Hamilton:

That's exciting. Thank you, Neil. Steven, what's next for you?

What Is Next For The Rocky Linux Community? [44:56]

Steve Spencer:

I think trying to engage the community as much as possible, trying to get some more involvement in the documentation project. Also trying to support everything that infrastructure and dev and testing are doing. And I think what we have done in the past, for instance, documentation is try to be the go-to person or the go-to people for release notes, try to be there to write those up, try to get them formatted in such a way that we can get them posted. We just want to do more of that, but our biggest and our grandest goal is to get that community involvement that we need in the project.

Zane Hamilton:

Thanks, Steve. Skip, we've got a few things going on.

Skip Grube:

I do have a few things going.

Zane Hamilton:

It's next for you.

The Future of Rocky Linux Sustainability [45:47]

Skip Grube:

The Rocky Linx Project. In my mind, this is speaking from a dev technical perspective, two of the things that I feel are important and that I'm focusing on are first sustainability, technical sustainability. And what I mean by that ties into what Neil was talking about with documentation, but not the documentation. It ties in with Wale and Steven and what they do, but documentation around how it's built, right? Like all of us, we build, we build our packages here, we build our ISOs here, this is how it's done, this is how cloud images are produced et cetera, et cetera. And I feel like the more people that know about this and that know all the things that happen behind the scenes, the better. And that's what I mean by sustainability.

So I work as Neil said, working on Peridot build system documentation right now, but I mean, I want to get as many people introduced to this whole world as possible because I mean, yes, it's difficult, but a lot of the basics are pretty easy to grasp. Like this connects to this and this is how the RPM code goes through here and it spits out RPMs over here, you can grab 'em like that thing. And the other thing that I'm looking at right now, and I'm going to steal a bit of Sherif's Thunder here, is so right now Rocky 9 supports the same CPU architectures that Red Hat and the other Enterprise Linux distros support, which is Intel's X86, ARM64 processors, s390x, which is Mainframe and Power pc. And we are looking into the possibility, again Sherif, I know was already hard at work on this, but ARM32 bit, which is a separate thing from the ARM64 processors and RISC-V, which is the new, it's a pretty new, pretty hot open processor architecture. And we are right now, I'm not going to say anything more right now, but we are investigating the possibility of producing Rocky ports for these architectures. I think it could be really cool.

Zane Hamilton:

It's very cool.

Stack:

I'll just second that. Skip's blog is excellent for his deep dives. So if you have more articles, yeah. And then if you have some of those weird processor types join in on the SIG for the Alt Arch, because the more people we have helping out and testing the better.

Zane Hamilton:

That's great. Thanks, Stack. Wale, it's next for you.

Wale Soyinka:

I am also under a gag order. There is some exciting stuff coming for the documentation group. We're in very early talks about the things but it's going to be big, it's going to benefit the community a whole lot. It's very exciting stuff. I'm excited about it. But that's all I have to say about that. So stay tuned in for that.

Zane Hamilton:

Thanks for teasing. Now we have to make sure they come back. Serif, what's next for you other than Skip stole part of your thunder?

Expanded CPU Architecture Support For Rocky Linux [49:15]

Sherif Nagy:

There's still the other architectures and hopefully the new secure boot soon. I hope so. And I need to refine a little bit the generic ARM64 image that I'm working on. It's not officially part of Rocky yet because it needed a little bit more testing, but hopefully if this works as I expected or have in mind, it should mainly work with most embedded hardware. So you won't need to have a specific image for Raspberry PI or it's a little bit different technically, but you won't need to have a specific image for different boards that use ARM64 as long as they are supported in the mainline kernel. So far I only have very limited hardware, so I have few Raspberry PI, PI 400 and ROCKPro 64. It works. But I would love it if people from the community just told me, oh, I have this board, can you try to test it with me? Yes, please. So yeah, that's what's in the pipeline now along with some other stuff related to Secure Boot, but there is no need to disclose. It's just a new secure boot hopefully. So, yeah.

Zane Hamilton:

Very nice. Thank you very much. So if you have some special hardware, some embedded devices you want to play around with the Rocky, please reach out. Let us know.

Skip Grube:

What, what Sherif is describing here is how development happens too. It's people and ideas. They come together and they say, Hey, you got this new image, check it out. Like, do this hardware. Oh, this doesn't work, let's fix it. And this happens all the time in our collaboration platforms and I'm really, really happy about it.

Zane Hamilton:

That's very cool. Greg, what's next for you or what do you see next?

Peridot and RISC-V Support [51:12]

Gregory Kurtzer:

So what I'm excited about is, I mean, a lot of it was what was mentioned. So everything from Peridot, getting Peridot out there, getting more people using Peridot. Getting contributions back from the community on Peridot. I'm looking forward to the installation and the setup of Peridot to be so easy that we can just basically just go throw some helm charts into Kubernetes and boom, now you've got a whole Rocky system ready to go. So I'm looking forward to that, that to me is super cool. I'm looking forward to the special interest groups really furthering and expanding what people can do with Rocky and simplifying that we've got a number of special interest groups. Neil alluded to some of them and mentioned them directly. But there's a lot of interest around special interest groups and that definitely whether people are running Rocky or something else, that definitely goes right back into the community.

All of those different things that we're doing goes back into the community. You can use it on anything. What Skip was talking about regarding architectures, advanced architectures and other architectures. Super exciting. I'm really looking forward to RISC-V, of course. And then again, being able to take those and again, upstream, a lot of those contributions back in. So a lot of these sorts of areas I'm super excited about across the board. But I'm also really excited about this, and I don't think anyone else here is really super excited about this, but I am so excited about these legal documents, I gotta tell you. Because, what it is, is it's solidifying and fixing for the whole future of the project.

Solidifying everything that is important to this project and putting that in writing, right? And making that more formal, right? We all know what's important to the project and we all know why we're all interested in this project, but now actually formalizing that and publishing that, holding us accountable to what we say we're going to do, not just now, but a decade, two decades out, making sure that the project is being held accountable to these same sorts of values and then creating a structure that we can make decisions and we can evolve over time to better optimize ourselves. All of this stuff. Again, it sounds, I guess maybe a lot of people would say that, okay, just infrastructure that we need, you know what, but to me actually, after seeing this and being part of so many open source projects and this actually is really exciting to me. Plus, as I mentioned, I'm not really a useful developer anymore and whatnot. So this is how I can actually add value to the group. So, yay.

Zane Hamilton:

Open source legal. Is that what I'm hearing?

Gregory Kurtzer:

Maybe How is that?

Neil Hanlon:

Yeah, I knew there was something wrong with the guy.

Zane Hamilton:

Well, I really appreciate you guys coming on. I know we're up against time. I know that not everybody is represented. I just want to say thank you to everyone out there in the Rocky community that's contributing back and helping, loving watching this thing grow. And we want to invite you to be a part of that with us and go on this journey. So again, guys, can't thank you enough for what you're doing. Keep it up. We're really excited to see what comes next. See you guys next week.