From the RHEL 8.2 Release Notes:
Note that the
kexecfeature is deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Just curious if any of the Foreman Discovery team are away of this statement and have any idea of the future impact on using the discovery method to install systems?
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why kexec provisioning method never left Technology Preview state in Red Hat Satellite. This mechanism was built for testing and debugging and it was never meant to fully boot Linux hosts. At least not on the Intel platform, kexec is I think used in Petitboot to boot IBM POWER.
Our long-term plan is to replace kexec with some kind of “create parition with Anaconda, write bootloader, reboot” workflow. We will keep the possibility to call kexec manually via SSH tho once we integrate Remote Execution into Discovery which is also planned.
We are currently not actively working on that.
Just for the record, Red Hat is not removing kexec from RHEL, but from Anaconda (the kexec instead of reboot feature). It’s just a mess on Intel x86, but it’s still being used on IBM POWER and s390x architectures.