What’s New in Beaker 25?¶

Custom distros¶

Beaker now allows you to provision any arbitrary distro tree for your recipe, even if it has not been “imported” by a Beaker administrator.

In your job XML, use the new <distro/> element to specify the distro to be installed in your recipe. Unlike the traditional <distroRequires/> element, which applies your filter criteria to select a distro tree from Beaker’s distro library — the new <distro/> element must contain all of the necessary metadata for Beaker to provision your custom distro. For example:

<recipe ...>
    <distro>
        <tree url="http://lab.example.com/distros/MyCustomLinux1.0/Server/x86_64/os/"/>
        <initrd url="pxeboot/initrd"/>
        <kernel url="pxeboot/vmlinuz"/>
        <arch value="x86_64"/>
        <osversion major="RedHatEnterpriseLinux7" minor="4"/>
        <name value="MyCustomLinux1.0"/>
        <variant value="Server"/>
    </distro>
    ...
</recipe>

(Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee in #%s911515.)

Firmware version for devices¶

Beaker now tracks the firmware version (if known) of each device in the system, including the version of the system firmware (BIOS) itself. The version information is shown in a new column on the Devices tab of the system page.

(Contributed by Shawn Doherty and Jonathan Toppins in #%s1162317.)

Installation using Anaconda liveimg command¶

Beaker now supports installations which use the Anaconda liveimg command, to populate the installed system from a pre-built image rather than by installing RPM packages. This makes it possible to run Beaker recipes using the Red Hat Virtualization Host (RHVH) product.

(Contributed by Yuval Turgeman in #%s1420600.)

Filter systems by supported distro family¶

A new XML host filter has been added, which matches systems that are compatible with a particular distro family. For example, in the <hostRequires/> element of your job XML you can use the following filter:

<system>
    <compatible_with_distro
        osmajor="RedHatEnterpriseLinux7"
        osminor="4"
        arch="x86_64" />
</system>

to select a system which is compatible with RHEL7.4. Beaker will always select a system which is also compatible with the distro being provisioned in your recipe. You can use this if your recipe provisions RHEL6 but then tests upgrading to RHEL7, for example.

(Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1387795.)

Other new features and enhancements¶

A new command bkr job-comment lets you comment on recipe sets, recipe tasks, and results. (Contributed by Blake McIvor in #%s853350.)

If a task uses exclusions in the Release field of its metadata (for example, Releases: -Fedora21 to exclude Fedora 21), Beaker now stores this in the database as a list of excluded releases as expected. Previously, it would be represented in the database as an exclusive list of every other distro family known to Beaker, which would produce incorrect results when a new distro family appeared in Beaker. Note that this change only takes effect when a new version of the task is uploaded. The metadata for existing tasks will not be automatically updated. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s800455.)

The Architectures field of task metadata now also accepts exclusions (for example, Architectures: -x86_64 to exclude x86_64). Previously, exclusions were not accepted in this field and were rejected with a validation error. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s670149.)

Beaker now sends email notifications to system owners when their system is loaned or returned. The notification is only sent when some other user performs the action. The new notification type is enabled by default for new users. Existing users can opt in to these notifications on their preferences page. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s996165.)

The Notes tab of the system page has been re-designed and improved, to address some usability issues. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1016409.)

A new system-wide permission “change_prio” has been defined. If the Beaker administrator grants this permission to a group, users in the group are allowed to change the priority of any queued Beaker job (including other users’ jobs). Previously this capability was only allowed for the undocumented, hardcoded group name “queue_admin”. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1159105.)

A new kickstart metadata variable beah_no_console_output has been added. When this variable is defined, the Beah test harness will be configured to suppress its debugging messages which are normally printed to the console. Messages from other sources are unaffected. This variable has no effect when the recipe is using a harness other than Beah. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1410799.)

The Excluded Families tab of the system page now has a button labeled Exclude All, which will pre-select all distro families to be excluded. (Contributed by Shawn Doherty.)

Beaker now has a favicon. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan.)

The job page search now defaults to searching based on whiteboard text. You can also enter a job ID prefixed with “J:” to search for a specific job instead. (Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee in #%s999933)

Notable changes¶

This release removes support for Beaker’s original group sharing model for jobs, which allowed any group member to have full control over any jobs submitted by any other members of the group. This “implicit job sharing” behaviour was deprecated in Beaker 0.15 and disabled by default in Beaker 22. In previous releases the beaker.deprecated_job_group_permissions.on setting could be used to enable the old, deprecated behaviour. This setting is now ignored. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan.)

Beaker now passes the network --hostname kickstart option to Anaconda, so that the system hostname always matches the expected FQDN as it is known to Beaker. Previously, when this option was not supplied, Anaconda would leave the hostname unset causing systemd to set the hostname from DHCP. On systems with multiple NICs this would cause the hostname to randomly vary depending on which interface came up first. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1346068.)

When a system owner changes the access policy on their system, newly added or deleted policy rules are recorded in the system activity record. Previously, the rules would be represented in the form <grant view to Some Group> where “Some Group” is the display name, not the group name. For consistency with other parts of Beaker’s web UI, and to make the records more easily machine-readable, the rules are now represented in the form Group:somegroup:view where “somegroup” is the group name. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s967392.)

If a recipe uses custom partitioning (<partitions/> element), Beaker now uses the reqpart kickstart command if the distro supports it, instead of explicitly creating platform-specific partitions. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1230997.)

Provisioning S/390 guests now uses FTP instead of TFTP for fetching the kernel and initramfs images, to work around a limitation in the z/VM TFTP client which cannot handle files larger than 32MB. This requires a corresponding update to the zpxe.rexx script. Beaker administrators can restore the previous behaviour of using TFTP if necessary, by setting ZPXE_USE_FTP=False in labcontroller.conf. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1322235.)

The scheduler now keeps track of newly released systems and assigns them to the next suitable queued recipe, if one exists. Previously the scheduler continually polled for queued recipes which have matching free systems. This refactoring improves the scheduler’s efficiency in cases where there are many queued recipes, and also eliminates some corner cases relating to matching queued recipes which have guest recipes. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1519589.)

Beaker’s internal database representation of how jobs are deleted has been changed. Beaker now distinguishes between deletion of a job, which is triggered explicitly by a job owner or implicitly when a job reaches its expiry time — versus purging of a job, which is an automated process in Beaker to clean up associated database records and log files for deleted jobs. When upgrading to Beaker 25.0, any old deleted jobs which erroneously still have log files stored in Beaker will be marked for purging again, so that they are properly cleaned up. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1337789.)

Bug fixes¶

A number of bug fixes are also included in this release:

• #%s1425290: Version 0.7.12 of the Beah test harness has been released, with numerous improvements and clarifications to the log messages produced while the harness is running a recipe. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1538906: The pattern to detect kernel Oops messages now matches a broader variety of messages, including some Oops messages on 64-bit ARM kernels which previously went undetected. (Contributed by Róman Joost)
• #%s1491658: Beaker now accepts non-ASCII characters in the name part of the Owner field of task metadata. Previously, uploading such a task would be rejected with an error indicating that the Owner was invalid. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1504527: The beaker-watchdog daemon now correctly handles non-ASCII characters appearing in the console output of OpenStack instances. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1510710: The kickstart snippet to handle custom partitioning (<partitions/> element) now correctly includes an EFI system partition on x86 EFI machines which are configured to boot GRUB2 (that is, having NETBOOT_METHOD=grub2 key-value). Previously, the code only handled systems booting EFI GRUB 0.97 with the NETBOOT_METHOD=efigrub key-value. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1189432: When a system owner adds a new supported architecture on the Essentials tab of the system page, the Provision tab is now correctly updated to reflect the new architecture. Previously it was necessary to refresh the page to see the new options. (Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee)
• #%s1212578: The method= kickstart metadata variable is now obeyed when the manual variable is also defined. Previously, the method= variable would be ignored in some cases. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1415104: The bkr command now terminates with exit status 141 (128+SIGPIPE) when stdout is a pipe and the pipe is prematurely closed. Previously this would cause an unhandled exception. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1412488: The beaker-expire-distros and beaker-pxemenu lab controller commands now work correctly if a distro has been imported using https:// URLs instead of http:// URLs. (Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee)
• #%s1470933, #%s1470496: The bkr group-members and bkr group-create commands have been updated to use the newer JSON API for groups added in Beaker 22.0, instead of XMLRPC. (Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee)
• #%s1379519: The openstack_region.ipxe_image_id database column is now stored as BINARY, instead of the TEXT representation of the UUID value. (Contributed by Anwesha Chatterjee)
• A number of database schema integrity constraints have been fixed to be consistent with Beaker’s data model: #%s859785, #%s1393170, #%s1393173, #%s1393174, #%s1393181, #%s1393182, #%s1393183, #%s1393185, #%s1393186, #%s1393191. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)

Maintenance updates¶

The following fixes have been included in Beaker 25 maintenance updates.