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Version: 1.7

Release Notes

The Elemental project stack is made of various components such as the Operator and UI for example.

Each of these components have an independent development lifecycle with its own versioning. Once a new version is ready, meaning it fully integrates with the others components of the Elemental project stack, a release is made.

Here's the different components, their latest version and a link to the respective release notes on GitHub:

NameVersionRelease Notes
Elemental Operatorv1.7.3Link
Elemental Toolkitv2.2.2Link
Elemental Linuxv2.2.0Link
Elemental UIv3.0.1Link
Information on docs versioning

The docs versioning is based on the Elemental Operator component as it's the user "entrypoint" to the Elemental project stack.

Install or Upgrade to latest release​

In order to install this release of the Elemental Operator check the project documentation.

For already existing deployments use the following Helm commands to upgrade:

# Install/upgrade the CRDS chart
helm upgrade \
    --install -n cattle-elemental-system --create-namespace elemental-operator-crds \
    oci://registry.suse.com/rancher/elemental-operator-crds-chart

# Install/upgrade the operator chart
helm upgrade \
    --install -n cattle-elemental-system --create-namespace elemental-operator \
    oci://registry.suse.com/rancher/elemental-operator-chart

To install or upgrade from the helm chart repository use:

helm repo add elemental-stable https://rancher.github.io/elemental-operator/stable/

and installed or upgraded with

# Install/upgrade the CRDS chart
helm upgrade --install -n cattle-elemental-system --create-namespace \
    elemental-operator-crds elemental-stable/elemental-operator-crds

# Install/upgrade the operator chart
helm upgrade --install -n cattle-elemental-system --create-namespace \
    elemental-operator elemental-stable/elemental-operator

Known issues​

Install hooks not applicable in MachineRegistration resources​

The cloud-config defined in MachineRegistrations is not applying after-install-chroot stage. Since SL Micro 6.1 in order to apply after-install-chroot yip stages they should be defined as part of the SeedImage cloud-config. This stage is executed at install time and so that it needs to be present in the installation media.

ManagedOSVersion of type ISO may report a wrong version number​

The ManagedOSVersions used for OS installation and upgrades come from the OS Channel (ManagedOSVersionChannel) shipped with the Elemental Operator. The Channel contains two types of ManagedOSVersions: container and iso, where the former is used for OS upgrades and the latter for new installations. The iso types are sometimes labelled with a OS version lower than the actual one. This can be easily spotted by checking if the latest version of the available ManagedOSVersions of type container lacks a matching version of a ManagedOSVersion of type iso.

Example: the latest OS version actually present in the registry.suse.com/rancher/elemental-channel/sl-micro:6.1-baremetal OS channel is v2.2.0-4.4. The ManagedOSVersion of type container is correctly labelled v2.2.0-4.4, while the latest version of the ManagedOSVersion of type iso is v2.2.0-4.3: the iso type contains instead the OS version v2.2.0-4.4, as would result by checking the /etc/os-release file of the installed machine.

Predictable Network Interface Names​

The SLE Micro OS images with versions v2.1.1 and v2.1.2 (released in the default ManagedOSVersionChannel) adopt predictable network interface names by default.

This is a change from SLE Micro OS images previously released, so you should expect your Elemental hosts to switch the network interface names from the ethX template to the enpXsY one.

You can disable the predictable network interface names by passing the net.ifnames=0 argument to the kernel command line. To make it permanent:

grub2-editenv /oem/grubenv set extra_cmdline=net.ifnames=0
warning

The adoption of the predictable network interface names feature was not a planned one: it will be reverted in the next SLE Micro OS images starting from version v2.1.3. These OS images will include the net.ifnames=0 kernel command line argument by default.
The v2.1.3 OS images will be released via the default Elemental 1.6 channel.

SSH root access​

The SLE Micro OS images released in the current Elemental version (through the default ManagedOSVersionChannel) do not allow ssh root access via password anymore. Easyest workaround is to either configure ssh root access via an ssh key or add a new user to the system.

Kernel Panic on hypervisors​

OS Images based on SL Micro 6.0 can fail to boot with a kernel panic on virtual machines using an unsupported CPU type.
The x86-64-v2 instruction set is required. For best compatibility CPU host passthrough is recommended.