Beta#

What it is for#

One thing, mostly: the image has only ever run on one physical machine. It installs to a disk and reboots into itself — that is done, in virtual machines and on that machine, and three installer bugs were found that way. One board and one set of network controllers is an existence proof. It is not a compatibility list, and it tells you nothing about whether your appliance's NICs come up.

Seats go to operators willing to install on hardware nobody here owns and report what breaks. That is the gap between "it works" and "it works on yours".

What a useful report contains#

If you install on hardware, the information this project is missing is everything about your machine:

• the board or appliance model;
• the network controllers — lspci -nn | grep -i net;
• whether Secure Boot had to be turned off;
• whether every port appeared, and under which driver;
• whether the install completed and the machine came back up into the installed system.

That is exactly what turns "should work" into a list, and there is no list today.

What you would be running#

Read what is finished and what is not first, in full. The parts most likely to affect a beta installation:

• a lockout means a console session: the rescue boot entry and the rescue tool are at the console, and the factory reset on the System page needs someone who can still sign in;
• one in-place image upgrade on record, in a VM, and none on hardware;
• no release signature, so a checksum is the whole verification story;
• IPv6 observable on its own page only — the Routes page and the neighbour tables are v4;
• app images pinned by digest, which means an upstream security fix reaches a router only when we re-pin and ship a release.

What is not decided#

In the meantime#

Install it in a virtual machine. That is the path with the most evidence behind it, it exercises the same installer, the same units and the same first-boot sequence as the metal, and it will tell you within an hour whether the product is the shape you want. Then, if you like the shape, boot the live image on the box you would actually use and look at ip -br link — that alone answers the question the beta exists to answer.

Read on#

• Hardware — what has actually been run.
• Support.