c9eaf71fe0
This reverts commit 78c43c2078e292ac9b53d2d6a41a47466d283914. Unfortunately we must revert the Kernel upgrade as there are two problematic issues. One which is the break of ABI functionality with parted [1] and second the internal cryptop API [2] which removed required literals for the build of Intel QAT acceleration. In the two weeks running 5.8 we still learned a lot - we experienced a performance improvement of ~30% when doing NAT @ > 10GBit/s and also utilizing the build in updated drivers for Intel NICs and WireGuard. We are looking forward to the release of this years LTS kernel and we hope to ship this in the final 1.3 release. 1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?h=linux-5.8.y&id=692d062655 2: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?h=linux-5.5.y&id=d63007eb95
About
VyOS runs on a custom Linux Kernel (which is 4.19) at the time of this writing. This repository holds a Jenkins Pipeline which is used to build the Custom Kernel (x86_64/amd64 at the moment) and all required out-of tree modules.
VyOS does not utilize the build in Intel Kernel drivers for its NICs as those Kernels sometimes lack features e.g. configurable receive-side-scaling queues. On the other hand we ship additional not mainlined features as WireGuard VPN.
Kernel
The Kernel is build from the vanilla repositories hosted at https://git.kernel.org. VyOS requires two additional patches to work which are stored in the patches/kernel folder.
Config
The Kernel configuration used is x86_64_vyos_defconfig
which will be copied on demand during the Pipeline run into the arch/x86/configsi
direcotry of the Kernel source tree.
Other configurations can be added in the future easily.
Modules
VyOS utilizes several Out-of-Tree modules (e.g. WireGuard, Accel-PPP and Intel network interface card drivers). Module source code is retrieved from the upstream repository and - when needed - patched so it can be build using this pipeline.
In the past VyOS maintainers had a fork of the Linux Kernel, WireGuard and Accel-PPP. This is fine but increases maintenance effort. By utilizing vanilla repositories upgrading to new versions is very easy - only the branch/commit/tag used when cloning the repository via Jenkinsfile needs to be adjusted.