Gitpod Self-Hosted on Red Hat® OpenShift®

[ghuntley]

Red Hat® OpenShift® does not currently work with Gitpod Self-Hosted but we would like to support the platform in the future. In this GitHub issue members of the community can organise and potentially work together to implement the necessary changes.

[jgallucci32]

Given the current requirement for Gitpod is Linux Kernel >= 5.4 it will likely mean OpenShift will not work until RHEL9 is released.

[gsharma-jiggzy]

Any way we can help out? I saw the RHEL9 beta is out and lots of gov work is RHEL and Openshift based.

[jgallucci32]

@gsharma-jiggzy I recommend you ask @pawlean to create the channel #self-hosted-ocp in Discord to begin the process of deploying/testing Gitpod on OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).

[gsharma-jiggzy]

@pawlean can you make a channel in discord?

[pawlean]

@pawlean can you make a channel in discord?

Hey folks! Let's get this started 🚀

[cnukwas]

We're using OpenShift and interested in self-hosted Gitpods, is there any progress towards that?

[gsharma-jiggzy]

@pawlean @cnukwas sorry had to drop openshift due to a shift in work.

[srudolph-credera]

Looks like RHEL 9 is out with Kernel 5.14 - https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/9.0_release_notes/architectures. That should open the door to Gitpod, right?

[jgallucci32]

@srudolph-credera That is very unfortunate to hear. The minimum requirement is Kernel 5.2 as it includes a SYSCALL which was only made available in that version of the kernel. I'll dig through my notes to see which exact SYSCALL is being used to see if perhaps it will be backported to RHEL9.

UPDATE: The open_tree() system call is in use by Gitpod and first made available in Linux Kernel 5.2.
Ref: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscalls.2.html

UPDATE2: As @srudolph-credera pointed out 5.14 is newer than 5.2 so this should work.

[srudolph-credera]

@jgallucci32 - you've got me questioning my understanding of the Linux kernel versioning scheme, but it looks like 5.14 would be newer than 5.2: https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html. Apologies if I confused things by leaving out the patch version: 5.14.0.

[jgallucci32]

@srudolph-credera Yeah that's my mistake, I need more sleep lol.

You are correct that is a newer version and technically should support the needed system call.

[patrickeasters]

Is open_tree the only syscall needed from the 5.x kernel? Red Hat frequently backports features and bugfixes into older kernel versions.

In this case, open_tree was added in RHEL 8.4 based on the release notes in kernel-4.18.0-305.el8.

[jgallucci32]

Looks like there is an additional dependency from agent-smith referenced in #5647 (comment)

Once I determined open_tree was needed I stopped my work on RHEL8 + Gitpod and switched to Ubuntu 20.04

[krauthosting]

FYI it's not best-practice anymore to use RHEL hosts with OpenShift 4.
For nodes RHCOS or FCOS for OKD is the preferred operating system:
https://docs.okd.io/latest/architecture/architecture-rhcos.html
It's CoreOS rebuilt on RHEL/Fedora instead Gentoo (BTW forked as FlatCar).
In OpenShift 4.10 the RHCOS image is built on top RHEL8.4 packages:
https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.10/release_notes/ocp-4-10-release-notes.html
With heavy kernel back-porting better look at version but kernel capabilities.

[jgcrunden]

From the little I've used Gitpod, I'm loving it!
I'm interested in it being able to run on Openshift. Just looking through the comments above to understand what's blocking it.
It seems for the two identified:

1. open_tree - @patrickeasters has found it was backported to RHEL 8.4
2. agent-smith using eBPF - I've found the following, suggesting eBPF was introduced in RHEL 7.6 and in RHEL 8 as a Technology Preview

Are there any other things blocking Gitpod running on Openshift?
I'd like contribute if possible. How can I help?

[frank-hollmann]

open_tree syscall and ebpf are necessary for gitpod in ocp 4.x. open_tree is in rhel 8.4 and ebpf is supported since rhel 8.1. the corresponding rhcos releases are supporting the requested functionality as well.

So gitpod should be usable unter OCP 4.7 and later.