Beaker is developed iteratively, aiming to publish major new feature releases every 6-12 weeks, with smaller, lower impact, maintenance releases published between major versions.
This release roadmap aims to provide an overview of current plans for upcoming releases, as well as a record of past releases, and the most significant enhancements in those releases.
Refer to :ref:`dev-lifecycle` for more information on the Beaker development process.
Beaker will stop using XMLRPC protocol for communication. As a replacement we communication will be done via REST endpoint.
UI will be separated from backend of Beaker and built as a separate service.
Beaker 27 will support python 3 implementation for client and common. Authentication between client/lab-controller and server will be done via gssapi instead of kerberos. Furthermore, AMPQ producer will be introduced to send updates regarding job/recipeset/recipe status.
Beaker will use DNF stack instead of using YUM stack. This change will require to use at least EL7.6+.
Last maintenance release: 26.6 (24th Oct, 2019)
Beaker 26 starts to use Restraint as the default test harness for distributions compatible with RHEL8 and greater.
Last maintenance release: 25.6 (31th Aug, 2018)
Beaker 25 adds support for provisioning arbitrary distro trees, Anaconda’s liveimg command, collecting device firmware versions, and many other new capabilities.
Last maintenance release: 24.5 (27th Oct, 2017)
Beaker 24 will provide a production ready implementation for provisioning virtual machines in OpenStack. This provides a basis for supporting image based provisioning with OpenStack Glance.
Last maintenance release: 23.3 (7th Nov, 2016)
The focus on Beaker 23 was to improve Beaker's result reporting capabilities, as described in :ref:`proposal-job-page-improvements`. It ships with a new recipe state reflecting the provisioning of a machine and generating GRUB2 menus for x86 EFI systems.
Last maintenance release: 22.3 (1st April, 2016)
Beaker 22 added support for extra job XML elements and inverted groups.
This release also provides the ability to directly export results in a JUnit-compatible XML format, rather than continuing to require the use of external XSLT templates to perform the translation.
Last maintenance release: 21.2 (17th November, 2015)
Beaker 21 was shipped with one-click hardware scanning support for all Beaker
systems. From this release onwards, Beaker uses lshw for improved hardware
scanning abilities. This results in better system capability reporting,
resulting in a richer set of attributes to query on a larger set of hardware
architectures.
Last maintenance release: 20.2 (14th July, 2015)
The focus for Beaker 20 was to implement the :ref:`proposal-predefined-access-policies` design proposal. This proposal includes an initial implementation of "system pools" (replacing the current system groups feature), and allows systems to be configured to use the access policy associated with one of their pools, rather than the default system specific custom policy.
This release will also enhance Beaker's bare metal provisioning support by making it possible to select which bootloader to use based not only on the CPU architecture of the server being provisioned, but also the specific operating system being installed.
Last maintenance release: 19.2 (15th January, 2015)
The focus of Beaker 19 was to implement an improved system details page in the Beaker web UI, as the Beaker 0.15 release not only highlighted many of the shortcomings of the existing interface, but also provided greatly improved tools for dealing with them.
This release also saw a change in Beaker's version numbering scheme to drop the leading zero. Beaker has been in production use for several years at a number of organisations, so continuing to use a version number scheme that indicated pre-production status didn't really make sense.
See the Beaker 19 Release Notes for details.
Last maintenance release: 0.18.4 (24th October, 2014)
Beaker 0.18 included improved usage reminder emails as described in the :ref:`proposal-beaker-usage-report-emails` design propsal and introduced better support for custom distros (as described in the :ref:`custom-distros` design proposal).
See the Beaker 0.18 Release Notes for details.
Last maintenance release: 0.17.3 (14th August, 2014)
Beaker 0.17 included two new scheduler features:
- A test harness independent system reservation mechanism via the
<reservesys/>Job XML element. This makes it possible to debug issues during test execution which may have caused the external watchdog to expire, a kernel panic or an installation failure. - Force schedule a job on a system irrespective of its status. This makes it possible to run diagnostic tests on broken or manual systems before adding them back to the pool of available systems.
In addition, it included experimental integration with OpenStack for dynamically creating VMs (additional background available in the :ref:`proposal-dynamic-virtualization` design proposal).
See the Beaker 0.17 Release Notes for details.
Last maintenance release: 0.16.2 (17th April, 2014)
The focus of Beaker 0.16 was the :ref:`proposal-external-tasks` design proposal, allowing tasks to be managed as references to external git repositories, rather than forcing reliance on Beaker's centralised library of task RPMs.
In addition to the significant benefits this offers in task management itself (such as more exact reproducibility of previous test runs, easier testing of experimental versions of tasks and more flexibility in test structure), this proposal also has the benefit of avoiding the need to frequently regenerate yum repo metadata for a central task library that may end up containing thousands of tasks.
See the Beaker 0.16 Release Notes for details.
Last maintenance release: 0.15.5 (25th February, 2014)
The focus of Beaker 0.15 was the :ref:`proposal-access-policies` design proposal.
Just as the enhanced user group model allowed groups to assume shared management of jobs, the new access policy model allows groups to assume shared management of systems.
See the Beaker 0.15 Release Notes for details.
Note that the initial release of Beaker 0.15 including a number of critical defects in the revised permissions model and the upgraded web interface that rendered it effectively undeployable. The release date given above is for the 0.15.1 maintenance release that addressed these critical issues.
Due to the extended maintenance lifecycle for Beaker 0.14, Beaker 0.15 also had an extended maintenance life cycle.
Last maintenance release: 0.14.4 (29th November, 2013)
The focus of Beaker 0.14 development was the completion of :ref:`proposal-enhanced-user-groups`, by allowing users to nominate "submission delegates" that can submit jobs on their behalf.
See the Beaker 0.14 Release Notes for details.
Due to the issues with the initial Beaker 0.15 update, Beaker 0.14 received an extended maintenance life cycle.
Last maintenance release: 0.13.2 (3rd July, 2013)
The focus of Beaker 0.13 was :ref:`proposal-enhanced-user-groups`
The elements of the proposal implemented in this release included three key elements:
- Administrators may delegate membership of specific groups to an LDAP server (to avoid maintaining membership data in two locations)
- Users may create and manage their own custom groups (to avoid overloading the administrators of large installations)
- Jobs may be submitted on behalf of a group, granting all members of that group full access to the job (to avoid the creation of shared accounts for collective management of jobs)
See the Beaker 0.13 Release Notes for details.
Last maintenance release: 0.12.1 (23rd April, 2013)
Beaker 0.12 made it easier for users to switch between production and development Beaker instances. It has three key elements:
- A new script was added to the Beaker server tools, which allows a system administrator to update the task library from the task library of another Beaker instance
- The Beaker client gained a new
--hubparameter which makes it easy to run a command against a Beaker instance other than the one in the system or user configuration file. - The Beaker client configuration architecture was adjusted to make it easy to provide a system wide site specific configuration file, rather than requiring each user to define their own configuration
See the Beaker 0.12 Release Notes for details.
For details of all releases back to 0.9.0 (1st June, 2012), refer to the release download page.
For dates of all releases back to 0.3 (14th May, 2009), refer to the release tags in the Beaker git repo.