Ben,
we did not want to rush this in because maintaining two versions of FDI is twice as much work and having an older version of discovery is safer when you want to install newer version of OS. With EL8 based FDI kexecing into EL7 kernel could not be even possible, I haven’t tried.
But the main reason is that FDI has smart-proxy and it is not yet available for EL8, So actually to be able to ship FDI on EL8, we need to have Foreman on EL8, which is not available yet. Going forward, I’d like to actually remove smart-proxy from FDI and replace it with a simple python/shell script doing the same (kexec or reboot REST API). After this is done, we can start working on this.
Also note EL8 uses new building infrastructure as well (lorax instead of livecd-creator), there might be bigger changes needed in order to build it. I haven’t looked into this yet.
If you want to help with this, we can coordinate works and I should be able to help you. My TODO is currently:
- Write a replacement of SPDI plugin in something that has no dependencies (e.g. C, golang, bash -ehm- or system-python which is always present on RH systems)
- Drop smart-proxy from FDI and deprecate the SPDI plugin
- Build Facter4 for EL8 and get that published in Foreman (client?) repos
- Build FDI on EL8
- Bonus: Replace the TUI written in Ruby-newt with whiptail/shell
- Bonus: Replace Facter4 with uFacter and completely remove Ruby from the image
- Bonus: Integrate discovered nodes with Remote Execution so users can schedule SSH scripts on discovered nodes