Table of Contents
xCAT 2.19.1 Release Notes (September 25, 2026)
xCAT 2.19.1 is the first maintenance release of the 2.19 series. Every change is a fix for a reported defect. The release adds no new capability and does not change the operating system support matrix introduced with xCAT 2.19.
Only the core packages are new. No dependency package changed, so the 2.19 xcat-dep repositories
are the ones published with 2.19.0 and 2.19.1 installs against them.
Highlighted Changes
The otherpkgs postscript
Six defects in one postscript, reported together.
- The postscript logged
<packages> installed.even when the package manager failed, so a failed install looked successful in the log. See #7846. - Package-manager output reached syslog as a single
#012-escaped message and was silently truncated, which lost the reason for a failure. See #7844. - Leftover diagnostic lines printed the whole package list on every run, whatever
VERBOSEwas set to. See #7845. - An
httporhttpsOTHERPKGDIRentry produced a repositorybaseurlwith a trailing space, and the guard for an internet entry tested a literal string instead of the variable. See #7847. - On SUSE the zypper branch refreshed and removed a repository it had not added, when an
httpOTHERPKGDIRentry was present. See #7848.
All six are in #7850.
The install monitor serialized every node
nodeset and updatenodestat ran synchronously inside xcatd's install monitor, so one node's
request blocked every other node that was installing, and a plugin failure killed the monitor with
no restart. Each node's requests now run in a child process, in the order the node sent them. See
#7852 and
#7853.
Postscripts and /xcatpost
updatenoderepopulated/xcatpostand left it behind althoughsite.cleanupdiskfullxcatpostwas set. See #7849 and #7851.- The diskful cleanup deleted a diskless node's postscripts.
- A diskful install ran a postscript that bash could not parse, because of the delimiter of the here-document that embeds it.
Ubuntu
- The ppc64le diskful install stopped without
grub-ieee1275, which the installer needs to write a bootloader on Power. See #7834. - grub2 could not load the Ubuntu 26.04 ppc64el netboot initrd: the initrd firmware step read the root image only and ignored custom drivers and firmware overrides. See #7843.
- A failed Ubuntu install stopped until the provisioning timeout expired instead of reporting the failure when it happened.
PostgreSQL
xcatadm had no CREATE privilege on PostgreSQL 15 and later, where a plain user cannot write to
the public schema. See #7862.
Building from source
- Repository indexing failed on every target when the build ran on a shared tree. See #7866.
- The build could not take its lock on a shared tree.
flockon an NFS re-export answers errno 524, so the lock is now a directory. The same change stops a cancelled build leaving workers that keep writing the checkout. See #7867. - The Ubuntu Genesis image was built from the kernel of the build host rather than from the image recipe. See #7835.
Installation
EL (RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky 8, 9 and 10)
# /etc/yum.repos.d/xcat-core.repo
[xcat-core]
name=xCAT 2 Core packages
baseurl=https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/yum/2.19/xcat-core
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/yum/2.19/xcat-core/repodata/repomd.xml.key
The dependency repositories are unchanged from 2.19.0. Take the two published files, where <N> is
the EL major version:
curl -fsSo /etc/yum.repos.d/xcat-dep.repo \
https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/yum/2.19/xcat-dep/rh<N>/$(uname -m)/xcat-dep.repo
curl -fsSo /etc/yum.repos.d/xcat-dep-common.repo \
https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/yum/2.19/xcat-dep/common/xcat-dep-common.repo
Then:
dnf clean all
dnf makecache
dnf install xCAT
dnf makecache matters: a client that still holds the 2.19.0 metadata does not see 2.19.1.
Ubuntu (22.04, 24.04 and 26.04)
The core suites are focal, jammy, noble and resolute, each with one component, main.
curl -fsSL https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/apt/2.19/xcat-core/apt.key \
| gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/xcat-core.gpg
curl -fsSL https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/apt/latest/xcat-dep/apt.key \
| gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/xcat-dep.gpg
codename=$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xcat.list <<EOF
deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/xcat-core.gpg] https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/apt/2.19/xcat-core $codename main
deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/xcat-dep.gpg] https://xcat.org/files/xcat/repos/apt/latest/xcat-dep $codename main
EOF
apt-get update
apt-get install -y xcat
Offline tarball bundles
- EL core: https://xcat.org/files/xcat/xcat-core/2.19.x_Linux/xcat-core-2.19.1-linux.tar.bz2
- Ubuntu core: https://xcat.org/files/xcat/xcat-core/2.19.x_Ubuntu/xcat-core-2.19.1-ubuntu.tar.bz2
A core bundle holds the xCAT packages only, so an offline install needs the dependency bundle as well. Its contents are the ones published with 2.19.0:
- EL dep: https://xcat.org/files/xcat/xcat-dep/2.x_Linux/xcat-dep-2.19.1-linux.tar.bz2
- Ubuntu dep: https://xcat.org/files/xcat/xcat-dep/2.x_Ubuntu/xcat-dep-2.19.1-ubuntu.tar.bz2
Each bundle unpacks to a directory with mklocalrepo.sh, which points the package manager at the
unpacked tree.
Source
The signed tag and the GitHub source archives are on the xCAT 2.19.1 release page.
The complete change set is the 2.19.0...2.19.1 comparison.
Documentation
Complete documentation is hosted at https://xcat-docs.readthedocs.io/.
News
- Apr 22, 2016: xCAT 2.11.1 released.
- Mar 11, 2016: xCAT 2.9.3 (AIX only) released.
- Dec 11, 2015: xCAT 2.11 released.
- Nov 11, 2015: xCAT 2.9.2 (AIX only) released.
- Jul 30, 2015: xCAT 2.10 released.
- Jul 30, 2015: xCAT migrates from sourceforge to github
- Jun 26, 2015: xCAT 2.7.9 released.
- Mar 20, 2015: xCAT 2.9.1 released.
- Dec 12, 2014: xCAT 2.9 released.
- Sep 5, 2014: xCAT 2.8.5 released.
- May 23, 2014: xCAT 2.8.4 released.
- Jan 24, 2014: xCAT 2.7.8 released.
- Nov 15, 2013: xCAT 2.8.3 released.
- Jun 26, 2013: xCAT 2.8.2 released.
- May 17, 2013: xCAT 2.7.7 released.
- May 10, 2013: xCAT 2.8.1 released.
- Feb 28, 2013: xCAT 2.8 released.
- Nov 30, 2012: xCAT 2.7.6 released.
- Oct 29, 2012: xCAT 2.7.5 released.
- Aug 27, 2012: xCAT 2.7.4 released.
- Jun 22, 2012: xCAT 2.7.3 released.
- May 25, 2012: xCAT 2.7.2 released.
- Apr 20, 2012: xCAT 2.7.1 released.
- Mar 19, 2012: xCAT 2.7 released.
- Mar 15, 2012: xCAT 2.6.11 released.
- Jan 23, 2012: xCAT 2.6.10 released.
- Nov 15, 2011: xCAT 2.6.9 released.
- Sep 30, 2011: xCAT 2.6.8 released.
- Aug 26, 2011: xCAT 2.6.6 released.
- May 20, 2011: xCAT 2.6 released.
- Feb 14, 2011: Watson plays on Jeopardy and is managed by xCAT!
- xCAT Release Notes Summary
- xCAT OS And Hw Support Matrix
- xCAT Test Environment Summary
History
- Oct 22, 2010: xCAT 2.5 released.
- Apr 30, 2010: xCAT 2.4 is released.
- Oct 31, 2009: xCAT 2.3 released.
xCAT's 10 year anniversary! - Apr 16, 2009: xCAT 2.2 released.
- Oct 31, 2008: xCAT 2.1 released.
- Sep 12, 2008: Support for xCAT 2
can now be purchased! - June 9, 2008: xCAT breaths life into
(at the time) the fastest
supercomputer on the planet - May 30, 2008: xCAT 2.0 for Linux
officially released! - Oct 31, 2007: IBM open sources
xCAT 2.0 to allow collaboration
among all of the xCAT users. - Oct 31, 1999: xCAT 1.0 is born!
xCAT started out as a project in
IBM developed by Egan Ford. It
was quickly adopted by customers
and IBM manufacturing sites to
rapidly deploy clusters.