[Feature] MAAS should have a way to use -proposed for commissioning and deployments

[Jeff Lane ]

This is actually a two-part request for both MAAS and the image streams.

First, the streams should provide kernels in -proposed in addition to the ones from -updates to MAAS to be used for enlistment and commissioning and deployment.

Second, MAAS should have a way (maybe a checkbox for "use Proposed kernel") to pull and use that kernel for those actions when requested.

The use case for this is like this: Let's say there's a kernel regression that breaks MAAS deployments or commissioning for a system. Currently, there's no real way to pick a kernel, you either get "GA" or you get "HWE" but can't pick "future" kernels or even "previous" kernels via MAAS to work around this.

This would be extremely helpful, I think, as it provides a way backwards to a last known working kernel (hopefully) and forwards to test out a proposed kernel to validate that it fixes the issue, or provide a workaround to get things deployed until that proposed kernel lands in Updates and then into MAAS.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

Hi Jeff,

The initrd's MAAS uses are created from the latest in -updates and are provided by simplestreams. To use -proposed, there needs to be initrds created and exposed over simplestreams. MAAS doens't create initrds on the fly, not will gain such functionality.

Hope this helps.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

I did mention that this needs to be handled via maas-images (but I did forget to add that as affected). However, I disagree that no change is necessary on MAAS part.

The way I see this working is:

maas-images provides a GA, HWE and then a GA-Proposed and HWE-Proposed for the kernels and initrd.
MAAS would need to host those, and I presume that would naturally happen when MAAS syncs the image stream, just as it does once a HWE option becomes available (such as soon when 18.04.2 comes out with the 18.10 kernel).

The change I see for MAAS, however, is the ability to turn this off and on. Simply a boolean flag for "Display Proposed Kernels" that when checked in Settings would enable the deployment using proposed kernels but when unchecked would only display the GA and HWE standard options.

Why would this be useful? Yesterday I could deploy Xenial onto my hardware. Today, I am wanting to upgrade my systems to Bionic. Bionic is broken, so I've interacted with Canonical and have been told "There's a kernel that fixes your issue in proposed". Oh great! I use MAAS to deploy all my hardware, how do I install using Proposed, since my hardware is currently unbootable?

The answer is, I can't. MAAS should enable me, as a user, to be able to test these new kernels when a regression renders my entire rack of hardware undeployable, and that can be accomplished (unless there's some other technical limitation I'm not seeing) as I've described above.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Note, in my scenario above, "upgrade my hardware to bionic" really means redeploy my workloads on Bionic using MAAS so I can have the latest and greatest Ubuntu.

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

Hi, we're tracking feature requests in our discourse (https://discourse.maas.io/c/features).

Could you please post there with your proposal?