uCore: Let's Streamline! (not retiring)

uCore
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Thank you to everyone who responded to my uCore retirement post! Not only did you share feedback here, but also in Discord, in public and private channels.

After discussing with several team members, we agree: uCore will NOT be retiring.

Clearly people value uCore and are hesitant to get excited about a new project without first seeing it, especially when the first thing presented is a retirement message rather than an invitation to see the new option. In retrospect, this is perfectly obvious, and my post probably seemed quite shocking, a case of having the cart before the horse. Though I’d been thinking many of these things for some time, only a few people really knew it.

Myself and other team members run uCore on many systems, and that won’t change until our new bootc based server project is ready for us to migrate We hope to have a seamless migration path for uCore users, but even with that, we have no reason to consider retiring the uCore unless data shows users have made the switch.

All said, we will immediately streamline uCore builds, aligning with recent cleanup decisions elsewhere in Universal Blue. We don’t want every possible image combination; we want a few purpose built images.

Specific streamlining changes will be:

  • include ZFS in all ucore* images
    • pre-included ZFS is a huge differentiator: it is the “last word in filesystems” after all
    • this action will cut the number of ucore images in half, from 24 down to 12
    • users already opted in to ZFS will continue to receive automatic updates with existing tags
  • cease building fedora-coreos images
    • stock Fedora CoreOS but with the nvidia and/or ZFS drivers can be easily replicated using the ublue-os/image-template
    • this action removes an additional 6 images

Combined these actions will reduce the number of images built from 30 to 12! That’s a significant savings in Github builders, but more importantly, it reduces maintenance and communication complexities.

Thank you to all our users who have contributed to the project and provided feedback over the past few years!

Sorry for any confusion caused by the ‘retirement’ post! Keep enjoying uCore!

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How much do you guys pay for GitHub Workflows, if any?

And glad to hear it’s not retiring! I’m waiting eagerly for the new Bootc Server, because man I just can’t wait to unify all of my ecosystem with ublue instead of Ubuntu.

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Github let’s you do it for free. Definitely this will go away some day, but it’s great while it lasts @fenglengshun

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Would be great to make arm64 images… I may try maintaining a fork for that purpose. I got some arm VPSes.

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What a dilemma you’ve thrown me!

I use uCore on a home server, and in preparation for uCore retirement I was having fun building my own Fedora bootc derived server image, learning the tools, etc. I was this close :pinching_hand: yesterday to doing the bare metal install and blowing away uCore.

So do I stick with uCore now which is better than my jank, or do I continue building my own… ?

:laughing:

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Why not both?

As in, make that decision later; stick with uCore for now, meanwhile continue learning bootc and building your image as time and interest permits.

In a few months, once the new “server” image is available you can check it out and re-assess. And at that time you may again choose to postpone changes for a few months.

See how it goes, and in the mean time have fun learning, so there are more / better choices available to you when the time comes.

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I know about that, I have my own builder, but using GitHub free, I’ve come across to build issues that, asking around on the Discord, was suggested to be some size or compute limitation of Github free.

I’d imagine for the sheer amount of images ublue makes, it has to be paid…

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We currently are on the tier that provides 60 concurrent builders from GitHub. This is partially why you hear us talk about number of images. These builders are shared across the entire organization.

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We pay sixty bucks a month for GitHub builders, which is covered by the donations. The issue with builders isn’t cost it’s velocity.

In this example let’s say someone finds a bug and sends in a PR, when you submit all those builders fire off. Once those build, after someone sees the fix and applies, it merges into the main ucore branch.

All those builders fire up again to merge it. Or he says, this needs to be fixed, and then submitted pushes, and then the builds fire up in the PR, again. And then can be merged.

Multiply that across bluefin, aurora, and bazzite - including the package repos to build RPMs. etc. On a busy night we can all saturate the builders (they instead queue up).

This is why remove images - at one point Bazzite couldn’t rev on a Friday because we were making a ton of base images that no one was really using. So we slim down on purpose.

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It’s very apparent when we have to rebuild the world.

It’s also why we don’t like making changes to main. If something messes up there, we have to rebuild it and all our downstreams.

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A preview of the uCore Streamlining effort…

I believe this is about ready to go, but I am waiting on any directly applicable feedback.

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It is great to have a top-down hierarchy until this reality faces you.

Architecture is always about trade offs.

I loved watching all the experimentation this year (read: innovation), but I knew reality would raise its ugly head sooner or later.

Loved the pursuit of new ideas; and the fail fast mentality.

Move fast; but cost efficient.

Some really smart moves.

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Love all the efforts to modernize and streamline! I was one of the ones that was a bit shocked by the ucore “retirement” post but this new post completely clears my worries. I’m actually all for moving to bootc, though I won’t be migrating my main server to it until all you trusted maintainers deem it ready, I will try to spin up a little server using it to try to help contribute to the efforts through bug filing/discussion.

Thanks for all your hard work making my server set up so stable and featureful! And the streamlining is great, I don’t use ZFS, but it’s kinda cool that I can just try it now and I support all efforts to make things more maintainable.

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