Ansible request for RHEL/CentOS 8 libmpc-devel & libdwarf-devel

[Willsparker]

Ref: #1743

• Missing install

Details:
The libmpc-devel and libdwarf-devel packages have moved to the CodeReady Linux Builder (CRB) repo, and the PowerTools repo for RHEL and CentOS respectively (though we may be able to use PowerTools for RHEL..?).
The referred PR above will remove them from the list of packages to install in the meantime, however we need both the packages to build OpenJ9, so we need to find a way of getting them in.

Some useful resources, found by @sej-jackson :
https://computingforgeeks.com/enable-powertools-repository-on-centos-rhel-linux/
https://access.redhat.com/articles/4348511

[Willsparker]

Checking this we can get libmpc-devel and libdwarf-devel from the repos,so I'll test with CentOS and then try find a RHEL machine to test on, somewhere

[Willsparker]

Checking on a CentOS8 Vagrant VM, the Powertools repo is already installed from the start, it's just a case of enabling it. Unfortunately, attempting to enable it either through yum or dnf commands didn't seem to work, but enabling it manually did (i.e. using vi). This would be easy enough to ansiblise, however.

[Willsparker]

Having checked the test-aws-rhel8-x64-1 machine, unfortunately, the PowerTools repository doesn't exist on the machine ( and in a brief Google search, I couldn't find if it to be installable ). That unfortunately leaves us with having to deal with the CRB repo and subscription-manager if we want to build OpenJ9 on RHEL8+. Running a few commands on the machine whilst I was testing, I found that that particular machine hasn't been registered yet, and so repos were available via subscription-manager.

[root@54 ~]# subscription-manager repos
This system has no repositories available through subscriptions.
[root@54 ~]# subscription-manager list --available
This system is not yet registered. Try 'subscription-manager register --help' for more information.

While we can likely ansibilise the subscription-manager commands, registering the subscription may not be possible.

[Willsparker]

I've had a quick look trying to install it manually, via wgeting from here , however, it ends up leading down a dependency path. libdwarf-devel depends on libdwarf, which one CAN install on RHEL8 (via the AppStream repository), but rpm still seems to think there are unmet dependencies (possibly due to trying to install a CentOS8 libdwarf-devel, not a RHEL8 one?)

Either way, it's not the 'proper' way to do this.

[Willsparker]

@gdams / @sxa Can either of you see any way of registering a RHEL8 subscription via Ansible? I'm not even sure if we can do it manually, given our machines are provided to us ...

[gdams]

I don't think that we have a RH subscription so it's unlikely that we can do that, unless @sxa can pull some strings now that he's on the inside??

[Willsparker]

ref: #2008
Lucky this came about - this should help in getting the packages we need for RHEL8 :-)

[sxa]

We have an outstanding request for a ROSI subscription which will allow us to run RHEL but it has not come through yet.

[sxa]

Bumping this to October as I'll hopefully have some time next month to look at setting this up