----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan(a)redhat.com>
To: "beaker-devel" <beaker-devel(a)lists.fedorahosted.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2014 2:40:05 PM
Subject: [Beaker-devel] Defining & documenting Beaker's architecture
support levels
Something that came up recently is the question of how we clearly
communicate *how well* Beaker supports different architectures. In
particular, just because we support provisioning something doesn't
necessarily mean we support doing hardware inventory scans on it.
I think the first step in adding something like that to the architecture
guide is to just list out all the features that go into our architecture
support. That's a useful thing to have regardless, and it means we can
potentially go through and create a feature matrix for it (or perhaps
summarise it as a numeric ranking).
On the provisioning side, the items I'm aware of are:
- basic provisioning (i.e. can we boot it at all)
- boot menu (i.e. do we provide a boot menu for manual provisioning)
On the inventory side, the items I'm aware of are:
- basic inventory (i.e. memory, number of CPUs, disk info)
- CPU details (i.e. precise details of the CPU capabilities)
So only x86 and x86_64 would currently get full marks - for everything
else, we don't currently provide full CPU details.
I think this also highlights for me that we *really* want at least a
summary in the architecture guide of what info beaker-system-scan
collects. It doesn't need to be completely detailed in terms of how the
information is reported back to Beaker, but having that list of "what
beaker-system-scan reports back to Beaker" will help explain the purpose
the inventory system serves, and (eventually) what some of the
limitations may be for architectures that aren't fully supported by some
of the scanning tools.
This should be available once I carry out the comparison of the results from
the "smolt" and "lshw" based inventory tasks for the various
architectures.
--
Amit Saha
SED, Hosted & Shared Services
Red Hat, Inc.