What’s New in Beaker 28?¶

Restraint as the default harness for all distributions¶

Restraint is now the default test harness, for all recipes. This means RHEL 5+, all currently supported Fedora releases and Fedora Rawhide.

Support for Beah remains. You can select it by using harness=beah in the kickstart metadata of your recipes. However, now it is necessary to add install_task_requires to kickstart metadata if you would like to populate the packages section.

(Contributed by Martin Styk - GitHub PR #46)

Support <kickstart/> without a template¶

By default <kickstart /> XML tag is used to add extra kickstart command to predefined template. We noticed that it may not suit all users; therefore, we added a support to define your own kickstart under <kickstart>. You can enable this feature with no_ks_template in your metadata.

Kickstart defined by <kickstart> will use our Jinja2 template mechanism, therefore it is highly recommended to combine it with our snippets. Especially with clear_netboot (Removes PXE files).

Warning: This feature bypasses common safeguards that might have been put in place by Beaker instance administrators and might render some systems unbootable if used incorrectly. Use with care.

For example .. code-block:: XML

<job retention_tag=”scratch”>

<recipe whiteboard=”” role=”None” ks_meta=”no_ks_template” kernel_options=”” kernel_options_post=”“>

<kickstart>

{% snippet ‘clear_netboot’ %}

</kickstart>

</job>

(Contributed by Martin Styk - Bugzilla Issue #1831885)

iPXE support¶

iPXE is a NIC boot ROM that can be flashed into devices, chain loaded from other boot agents, run as a UEFI executable, booted from physical media, etc.

In addition to extending boot support to protocols beyond TFTP, iPXE also includes powerful scripting support. This adds support for devices booting into the Beaker environment using that scripting support.

The behavior here is largely modeled after PXELINUX, however note that iPXE does not start fetching files with patterns based on device MAC address, IP address, or any of that when it loads, nor does it fetch a default file.

For more details please refer to Boot loader images.

(Contributed by Alex Williamson and Martin Styk - Bugzilla Issue #1788796)

Enhanced installation failure detection¶

Previously, we relied on output from console to detect installation failures. This may not work for several reasons.

• Machine is not attached to console server.
• Error strings are always changing and Beaker is unaware of new error.
• Reservesys Workflow completely ignores installation failures.

Now, we use combination of approach mentioned above and %onerror section. If installer hits a fatal error and %onerror section is executed we abort installation automatically.

This is supported on RHEL7+ and all Fedora. However, it can be disabled by disable_onerror defined in kickstart metadata.

(Contributed by Martin Styk - GitHub PR #15)

Multi-console log support¶

In conjunction with an external console logging system (such as conserver), Beaker also supports the automatic capture of the console logs for the duration of provisioning and execution of a recipe.

We decided to extend this support. Previously, Beaker was reading the only output of file defined by FQDN for a given system.

With multi-console support, you can get output from multiple consoles. The only requirement is that name of the file has to start with FQDN-.

For example following files will be logged as console files:

• CONSOLE_LOGS/test.example.com -> console.log
• CONSOLE_LOGS/test.example.com-bmc -> console-bmc.log
• CONSOLE_LOGS/test.example.com-serial2 -> console-serial2.log

(Contribued by John Villalovos - GitHub PR #11)

Bug fixes¶

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

• BZ#1600587: Beaker CSV Export is now working properly with bigger number of systems and excluded families.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• BZ#1851464: Beaker is now properly handling XML element type when it is used in Job XML.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• BZ#1803555: Multiple definitions of harness kickstart metadata are handled properly. All packages are installed by YUM/DNF.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• BZ#1796851: Size for kickstart was extended. From previous 65535 characters to 16777215. When new size limit is breached job is automatically aborted to keep sane state in Beaker Scheduler.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• BZ#1711063: New documentation introduced for disabling default kernel cmdline options.

  (Contributed by Carol Bouchard)
• GH#58: User is now able to control skip_if_unavailable for Task Repo. Value can be set via skip_taskrepo kickstart metadata. Default value is 0.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• GH#48: Password is now hidden by default in power management settings. However, it can be revealed if necessary.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• GH#36: Extended support for system-modify cli command. Now system-modify can modify any power management settings.

  (Contributed by John Villalovos)
• GH#28: Removed issue with beaker-expire-distros --remove-all where error appears instead of removing all distributions.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)
• GH#24: beaker-import is now able to keep previously defined kernel_options, kernel_options_post, and ks_meta.

  (Contributed by John Villalovos)
• GH#19: Authentication cookies are persistent now.

  (Contributed by John Villalovos)
• GH#17: Alternative Harness API was extended. Now, Beaker supports power commands via API.

  (Contributed by Martin Styk)