SUSE/OpenSUSE: Name Change, YaST, MicroOS and More

The openSUSE project informed it's members by mail to vote for a potential name change. The vote ends on 07.11.2019 at 23:59 UTC. In a Wiki article the openSUSE Board and Election Committee have gathered the most important arguments for and against a name change for all members.

As you may know, we have recently extended YaST to support additional encryption mechanisms like volatile encryption for swap devices or pervasive encryption for data volumes. You can find more details in our blog post titled "Advanced Encryption Options Land in the YaST Partitioner".

Those encryption mechanisms offer the possibility of adjusting the sector size of the encryption layer according to the sector size of the disk. That can result in a performance boost with storage devices based on 4k blocks. To get the best of your systems, we have instructed YaST to set the sector size to 4096 bytes whenever is possible, which should improve the performance of the encrypted devices created with the recently implemented methods.

Additionally, we took the time to improve the codebase related to encryption, based on the lessons we learned while implementing volatile and pervasive encryption. We also performed some additional tests and we found a problem that we are already fixing in the sprint that has just started.

Our Container Host OS openSUSE MicroOS and our Kubernetes platform openSUSE Kubic are both using transactionl-update to apply patches to the system. This implies that a read-only root filesystem is used. While this has big advantages, like it allows to update a cluster automatically in a safe way, this has one drawback: you need to reboot to activate new installed packages. But what if you want to debug a problem and the utility you need is not installed? Who says, that the problem is still debuggable after a reboot?

Beyond being an intermediate step, hybrid cloud isn’t particularly well defined. If you took a random selection of three CIOs, they’d each likely explain it differently. It’s a bit like asking three people to imagine a farmyard animal: one thinks “pig”, one thinks “hen” and the other thinks “cow”. All three are right, but all three are imagining something very different. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have given us an official hybrid cloud definition but not everyone agrees that this is that helpful. Lauren Nelson, principle analyst at Forrester, described this definition as “far from reality”. We’re at the top of the hype cycle and Nelson was making a fair point: NIST’s definition calls for active bursting from one environment into another, and while most enterprises would see themselves as hybrid, cross environment bursting is in practice nearly as rare as real unicorns.

This blog is about a funny integration of a plain Linux service into the SAP start framework sapstartsrv and SUSEs High Availability solution based on pacemaker. This solution is not intended to run in productive environments but should demonstrate how to integrate special services.