Streamlining kernel and init releases

[Sebastian Roth]

For a long time I wanted to get this done but kept putting it off. Finally I got around to work out the first few steps.

FOS kernels and inits will be released on Github from now on. Sure we’ll keep the old location (on https://fogproject.org/) online and updated for some time as well.

Official releases will be tagged using the FOG version number, e.g. 1.5.9. Find all the kernel and init binaries as well as checksum as assets here:
https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/releases/tag/1.5.9

dev-branch and working-1.6
All the developer versions of kernels (so far known as Kernel.TomElliott.x.y.z…) will now be tagged as a date string “YYYYMMDD” on Github, e.g. 20210717.

Whenever we push out a new FOS kernel/init release it will have the label latest attached to it. So to get those you can use universal URLs:
https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/releases/latest/download/bzImage
https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/releases/latest/download/init.xz
an so on…

Find the full list of released FOS kernels/inits here: https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/releases

Most users don’t need to worry about this at all. This is for people who want do dive into the details and maybe even help the project.

So far I updated the installer to use the new download locations from Github. But we also need to adjust the FOG web UI code to pull a list of available kernels from Github as well. I would prefer to drop pulling the kernel list from https://fogproject.org/ through the web UI altogether pretty soon. The kernels will still be available for people but only via manual download. But I am open to discuss this point. Let me know what you guys think about cutting that old rope…

Another step is to automate FOS kernel/init builds and releases. We use buildkite to compile binaries from the latest source since a while. Works great but needed manual intervention to make the binaries available for everyone. I added some script code magic to our buildkite task to create a release on Github and upload the binaries automatically. This should really help a lot in allowing new people to help us on the FOS kernel/init stuff without the need to mess with all the dirty details.