Daniel Hilst
e7f7717627
Eight of the parity decisions in the spec's Appendix A, where ISC dhcpd and
Kea answered the same frame differently and the operator never chose which
backend they got.
ISC gains two branches its if/else chain never had, so the client falls
through to /yaboot no longer:
- 0x000c ppc64 is given /boot/grub2/grub2.ppc. yaboot is not a UEFI
loader and cannot boot one of these machines (decision 2).
- 0x0010 is the same x86-64 UEFI firmware and the same loader as 0x0007,
announced by a machine set to fetch it over HTTP (decision 3).
Kea gains what ISC has always had:
- Etherboot, which predates option 93 and says what it is in option 60
alone, is recognised and given the BIOS loader (decision 10).
- onie_vendor is answered per subnet, not only per node: a switch
announces it on its first boot, before anyone has defined it as a node
(decision 11).
- A client nothing else recognises is given /yaboot. Kea has no else, so
the condition is the negation of every architecture and vendor class
another rule answers, rather than a dependence on class ordering
(decision 7).
- netboot=nimol is given /vios/nodes/<node> (decision 6).
and drops two answers ISC never gave:
- No BIOS loader on disk no longer means pxelinux.0 in its place. Naming
a file that is not there costs the client a timeout it cannot diagnose,
and a different loader boots something nobody asked for; the class is
simply not written (decision 8).
- netboot=petitboot sends the conf-file and nothing else. petitboot acts
on a boot file name when it sees one, so naming one as well sent the
machine after a TFTP fetch that never happens on ISC (decision 12).
xCAT
xCAT is a toolkit for deployment and administration of clusters of all sizes.
The xCAT sunset was only a quick eclipse
Dear xCAT Community,
The xCAT sunset has changed course. VersatusHPC has been invited to join the xCAT Consortium, and future development will move toward direct upstream contributions coordinated with the Consortium and its existing member companies.
That matters most for Enterprise Linux 10 (EL10). EL10 support is coming to xCAT, restoring a future operating-system path for sites that still rely on xCAT. This is an important change from the previous sunset guidance, where the lack of an EL10 path was one of the strongest reasons to move away from xCAT.
The xCAT Consortium continues to recommend Confluent as the long-term successor to xCAT, and that remains the Consortium position. Users planning new cluster-management deployments should evaluate Confluent and its xCAT comparison documentation.
At the same time, xCAT is no longer sunsetted. The Consortium and participating companies will continue updating xCAT while there is community and user demand for it.
In summary:
- xCAT development is continuing upstream through the Consortium and participating companies.
- Enterprise Linux 10 support is coming.
- Confluent remains the Consortium-recommended successor and migration path.
- xCAT updates will continue while there is community and user demand.
We want to thank the xCAT Consortium and community for keeping this project moving. The sun went behind the moon for a moment, but xCAT is still here.
For more information on Confluent and how to get started, please visit the Confluent: Project Page, Documentation or Confluent vs xCAT comparison.
With thanks,
The xCAT Consortium
Documentation
xCAT Documentation is hosted on Read The Docs: https://xcat-docs.readthedocs.io
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