Hi Nathan et al,
On 10/03/2026 1:48 am, Nathan Chancellor wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 03:44:13PM +0100, Guillaume Tucker wrote:
This boils things down to a few practical options:
1. treating TuxMake images with kernel.org toolchains as the de facto
stardard,
2. creating a repository from scratch on git.kernel.org with
independent hosting for base images,
3. some middle ground to be defined which would remove the risks
associated with third parties without duplicating efforts.
I feel it would be good to have more maintainers' feedback though.
Nathan, Nicolas, Miguel - what are your thoughts on this?
To be entirely honest, I do not really have a strong opinion here. I
generally agree with your thoughts around branded container images,
although I do think that TuxMake's images tend to be fairly lean, so
those easily could become the recommended images without many downsides
aside from maybe where they are hosted and how they are maintained.
Having a clean set of Containerfiles on git.kernel.org does not sound
like a bad idea, especially if they would be structured in such a way
that other entities could customize them for their use case further. I
guess its usefulness really depends on the other stakeholders like
KernelCI. It seems like there has to be some sort of buy in from the
kernel.org administrators around hosting built container images
somewhere on kernel.org though, as I don't think the regular developer
is going to want to build images locally. Not really sure what that
looks like.
Thank you for the feedback, it's very valuable even without a strong
opinion regarding the 3 options in my previous email. It also tends
to confirm that the risks I mentioned aren't too critical to get
started, having some developer adoption is more important for now.
With all this in mind, I believe we can follow a step-by-step
approach to start simple and deploy more tailored solutions as and
when the need arises. This can be seen as a bit of a Beta testing
phase until there is enough momentum to look into the longer term.
So here's what I would like to propose for the short term:
1. review current TuxMake kernel.org toolchain images[1] and
determine what needs to be added or changed there (e.g. I don't
see any GCC ones right now)
2. update the scripts/container tool to rely on tuxmake korg images
with default entries in a reference user settings file
3. encourage kernel developers to go and try it out and provide
feedback, maybe even run a small community survey
4. review the situation after a while e.g. once v7.1-rc2 is out and
decide what steps to take next based on community priorities
I believe there aren't any blockers here so we can probably just give
it a try as an experiment and see how it goes, unless someone has
anything else to suggest.
Things like moving the Containerfiles to git.kernel.org or hosting
the images in a dedicated registry etc. should eventually emerge by
themselves if there is a real need for them.
Best wishes,
Guillaume
[1] https://hub.docker.com/u/tuxmake?search=korg
