[Announce]: New features in 1465.0.0

[Alex Crawford]

Hello everyone,

While we usually don't send updates for every release, 1465.0.0
(released to the Alpha channel) has a few major changes that are worth
noting.

First, 1465.0.0 included Ignition 0.17.1 which stabilized the 2.1.0
configuration specification [1]. This new configuration has stabilized a
handful of new options. The details are covered in our documentation
[2]. The 2.1.0 specification is backward compatible with 2.0.0, so
you'll just be able to update the version number to take advantage of
the new features. The online validator [3] can be used to validate your
configs as you try it out. Ignition, of course, will continue to accept
2.0.0 configs.

Second, 1465.0.0 added support for using Ignition on Vagrant with the
VirtualBox backend. By default, the Vagrantfile will use the new
Vagrant-VirtualBox image (which only supports Ignition), but this can be
changed to use the older, generic Vagrant image which does support
coreos-cloudinit. This is all still very new, so we are still in the
process of updating the documentation on our site.

We are very interested to hear what you all think about the recent
changes (both good and bad). As always, we are watching this mailing
list, our bug tracker [3], and IRC [4].

-Alex

[1]: https://coreos.com/ignition/docs/latest/configuration-v2_1.html
[2]: https://coreos.com/ignition/docs/latest/migrating-configs.html#from-version-200-to-210
[3]: https://issues.coreos.com
[4]: irc://irc.freenode.org:6697/#coreos

[Bryan Talbot]

On Wednesday, July 12, 2017 at 3:29:35 PM UTC-7, Alex Crawford wrote:

Second, 1465.0.0 added support for using Ignition on Vagrant with the
VirtualBox backend. By default, the Vagrantfile will use the new
Vagrant-VirtualBox image (which only supports Ignition), but this can be
changed to use the older, generic Vagrant image which does support
coreos-cloudinit. This is all still very new, so we are still in the
process of updating the documentation on our site.

This seems to have broken our development environment which typically uses the -beta channel. Writes to folders shared from the dev laptop to the CoreOS guest (on virtualbox with vagrant) now typically hang.

I've created an issue https://github.com/coreos/bugs/issues/2069 with details on how to reproduce. I've been able to produce the issue on every release that includes Kernel 4.12 and Ignition 0.17.x. The issue never occurs on builds with older kernels or older ignitions.

For now, we've moved our dev environment to use -stable, but if these changes make it into that, we're kinda screwed.

[Alex Crawford]

On 07/24, Bryan Talbot wrote:
> I've created an issue https://github.com/coreos/bugs/issues/2069 with
> details on how to reproduce. I've been able to produce the issue on every
> release that includes Kernel 4.12 and Ignition 0.17.x. The issue never
> occurs on builds with older kernels or older ignitions.

Thanks for creating the issue. Since none of our team uses OSX, we could
use some help narrowing down which version of Container Linux broke this
feature. I'll follow up on the bug report with the same.

> For now, we've moved our dev environment to use -stable, but if these
> changes make it into that, we're kinda screwed.

Uh oh. We have a Stable release scheduled for Aug. 16th where we will
promote the current Beta. It sounds like this is going to break your
setup. Unfortunately, I don't think we are going to change course at
this point, so let's make sure we can get you pinned to the current
Stable so updates won't break your workflow. We have an Alpha every two
weeks, with the next release scheduled for next week. Let's see if we
can get the issue fixed in Alpha, so you can switch to that while we
wait for the fix to propogate to Beta.

Thanks for your patience.

-Alex