Will virt stream, advanced-virtualization come to Rocky Linux

Hi.
I have been waiting for the release of Rocky Linux so that I could use it on my oVirt virtualization platform (see https://ovirt.org). I’ve been using this wonderful system for years but have been unable to upgrade to the latest version because it requires either RHEL8 , CentOS 8, or CentOS Stream. I was waiting for Rocky Linux to be released to handle this. When Rocky was released, I found I couldn’t install oVirt with it because an oVirt Developer says that Rocky doesn’t support the virt stream-advanced-virtualization (providing libvirt 7.0.0 and qemu-kvm 5.2.0) which is required. Do I just need to wait patiently for this to get added? It would really fill a huge hole and allow people to continue to use oVirt from a more stable platform. Once CentOS is no longer what it once was, oVirt team will only support RHEL and CentOS Stream, and I choose not to run my virtualization platform with CentOS Stream.

Thanks, and I just wanted to express my gratitude for the Rocky Linux team in this incredible endeavour.

Jason.

Hello Rocky Linux team!

Hello Jason!

First, I sincerely want to thank you for releasing Rocky and for all the efforts you have been making so far in order to replace CentOS8.

I have been using oVirt for about 7 years now both for personal needs and work. Whenever somebody asks me what it is, I answer that it is “like vSphere but for Linux QEMU/KVM hypervisors” :slight_smile: because many times people really don’t know what it is and when I say this they immediately have an idea. I would warmly recommend it to everyone (not perfect but has lots of enterprise features).

I am in exactly the same situation as Jason. Basically, I am renewing my home lab with a new rack and new server chassis and I want to replace the underlying CentOS8-based hypervisors with Rocky Linux. I was about to start conversion but then I saw the post that Jason posted on oVirt site and here on this forum.

That being said I am not in any position to ask/demand Rocky team to create packages needed in advanced-virtualization repo but I would be really grateful if you can kindly let us know if you are planning to do it? That would help me to decide to which alternative I can focus on (Proxmox, virt-manager/virsh or even Openstack) in case the team is not planning to create these packages. Proxmox is the closest (in terms of GUI, etc.) but it uses a proprietary wrapper to interact with QEMU (instead of libvirt) and I would rather stick with something open-source. Also, I am aware of Xen-based solutions but I would rather stick with QEMU/KVM as well.

Thank you in advance.

Kind regards,
Branimir

Hello Rocky Linux Team,

Thank you so much for you engagement about free software and
the continuity of availability of this Operating system.

I am in the same case as Jason and Branimir.
I think a lot of Sysadmins are in this situation.

How can I help you and help us in the same time ?

Best regards.

Hello Rocky Linux Team -

I also would like to see this happen. Have Rocky Linux have the supported packages for oVirt! I too use oVirt in production on CentOS7 hosts. Holding out and hopeful Rocky Linux will support oVirt development and or ovirt partner up… Otherwise, we will have to switch all our hypervisor hosts to Oracle Linux.

Hello.

We currently are preparing for a way for sigs to build and submit packages as “advanced virt” would essentially be or be part of a SIG. As it stands now, we were able to build some of the packages for advanced virt, but there are others that are refusing to build. However, as it is currently low priority, I have not had a moment to look into it.

If you look through our koji you may be able to find when we were building the advanced virt packages and which ones failed. You could potentially join us on mattermost in the appropriate channels to help us diagnose the build failures to help expedite their inclusion into Rocky.

Hello @nazunalika,

It looks like your latest announcement about SIG Packages in Extras fills the gap!

Hello,

There will be no advanced virt SIG after RHEL 8.5 since these packages will be directly part of RHEL 8.6

https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-November/077455.html

Hi,

i had a short look at the build logs at koji. Started with the libraries and the first error I found was in libguestfs. Didn’t have a such deep look, if this solves several other builds as it should be a common dependency.

What would be the best solution to place the patch? Upstream directly at RedHat? Mailing List or BugZilla? Its my first time to contribute to a RHEL related software.

I did not verify the following patch with a successful build:

diff --git a/appliance/excludefiles.in b/appliance/excludefiles.in
index 181b1828d..75a19f12a 100644
--- a/appliance/excludefiles.in
+++ b/appliance/excludefiles.in
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ dnl This file is processed by m4 with one of the
 dnl following symbols defined (depending on the distro):
 dnl
 dnl   REDHAT=1     For Fedora, RHEL, EPEL and workalikes.
+dnl   ROCKY=1      For Rocky Linux.
 dnl   DEBIAN=1     For Debian.
 dnl   UBUNTU=1     For Ubuntu.
 dnl   ARCHLINUX=1  For Archlinux.
diff --git a/appliance/hostfiles.in b/appliance/hostfiles.in
index e78c79bd3..859d0dcc2 100644
--- a/appliance/hostfiles.in
+++ b/appliance/hostfiles.in
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ dnl This file is processed by m4 with one of the
 dnl following symbols defined (depending on the distro):
 dnl
 dnl   REDHAT=1       For Fedora, RHEL, EPEL and workalikes.
+dnl   ROCKY=1        For Rocky Linux.
 dnl   DEBIAN=1       For Debian.
 dnl   UBUNTU=1       For Ubuntu.
 dnl   ARCHLINUX=1    For Archlinux.
diff --git a/appliance/packagelist.in b/appliance/packagelist.in
index 77a07acc6..b44e0e044 100644
--- a/appliance/packagelist.in
+++ b/appliance/packagelist.in
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ dnl This file is processed by m4 with one of the
 dnl following symbols defined (depending on the distro):
 dnl
 dnl   REDHAT=1     For Fedora, RHEL, EPEL and workalikes.
+dnl   ROCKY=1      For Rocky Linux.
 dnl   DEBIAN=1     For Debian.
 dnl   UBUNTU=1     For Ubuntu.
 dnl   ARCHLINUX=1  For Archlinux.
@@ -22,6 +23,9 @@ dnl   ./configure --with-extra-packages="gdb valgrind [etc]"
 dnl Basically the same with a few minor tweaks.
 ifelse(UBUNTU,1,`define(`DEBIAN',1)')
 
+dnl Make Rocky compatible to RHEL.
+ifelse(ROCKY,1,`define(`REDHAT',1)')
+
 ifelse(REDHAT,1,
   cryptsetup
   cryptsetup-luks      dnl old name used before Fedora 17
diff --git a/m4/guestfs-appliance.m4 b/m4/guestfs-appliance.m4
index db67c6916..dc0984355 100644
--- a/m4/guestfs-appliance.m4
+++ b/m4/guestfs-appliance.m4
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ AC_ARG_WITH([distro],
     ]
 )
 AM_CONDITIONAL([HAVE_RPM],
-    [AS_CASE([$DISTRO], [REDHAT | SUSE | OPENMANDRIVA | MAGEIA ], [true],
+    [AS_CASE([$DISTRO], [REDHAT | ROCKY | SUSE | OPENMANDRIVA | MAGEIA ], [true],
                         [*], [false])])
 AM_CONDITIONAL([HAVE_DPKG],
     [AS_CASE([$DISTRO], [DEBIAN | UBUNTU ], [true],

You would need to contribute this upstream. You could put it in to the red hat bugzilla or see about contributing it otherwise.

With that being said, we already patch libguestfs for the virt module to force red hat to get it to build. The koji build you’re referring to is when we were looking to build out the advanced virt packages but decided not to because it made sense just to leverage the SIG packages of CentOS.

1 Like

Hi …
I had originally asked this question RE: “Will virt stream, advanced-virtualization come to Rocky Linux” back in July. I’ve been reading the responses, but I’m not clear where we are at. Is anyone able to run oVirt under Rocky Linux?

I was excited to hear about the inclusion of SIG packages in extras from “nazunalika”'s message. However, then ligenix reported this was being integrated directly itno RHEL 8.6, hope was lost again.

So, does this mean there is no hope for running oVirt on Rocky Linux yet? is it just a matter of time? or something that won’t be worked on.

Thanks for any updates …

Hello @jas,

Let me pick up on the point about advanced virtualization in Rocky Linux:
First, Rocky Engineering Team tried to build it in an internal SIG, but failed to achieve it due to some packages that require more digging,
Second, Rocky Engineering Team smartly added the ability to install CentOS Linux SIG from the extras repository, including advanced virtualization,
Finally, Red Hat will next merge advanced virtualization into RHEL 8.6 and so Rocky Linux 8.6.

And to answer your last important question, you can run the latest oVirt 4.4.9 on Rocky Linux 8.5 with CentOS Linux SIG advanced virtualization enabled, but if its has not been modified since, you need to disable some oVirt repositories, if you don’t want to mix with some newer CentOS Stream packages.