The IBM Power team is excited to introduce Open Source Edge for IBM Power, an evolution of our previous tool, the Open Source Power Availability Tool (OSPAT) for finding open source packages for Power. While OSPAT provided a snapshot of available packages that are updated periodically, Open Source Edge takes things further by offering more details, more currency, real-time data access, and interactive features to help you explore the open source resources that are available on Power.
What is Open Source Edge?
Open Source Edge offers all Power developers and users a central location to keep on top of the latest packages and their versions available for Linux on Power. While designing solutions, it is often critical to compose a solution with a variety of components, and in the software world, those components and their versions change rapidly. Also, with an increasingly turbulent security environment, understanding not just which versions are available, but the composition of those individual components, the individual security profile of each component, and having transparency into the build process and environment becomes increasingly critical.
Open Source Edge provides a framework for building and tracking open source projects, both those that are fully integrated into the development community with CI/CD and potentially publishing of artifacts for Power enabled, as well as those where, for some reason, full community integration hasn't been achieved.
Open Source Edge essentially connects upstream GitHub repositories with an adjusted build repository and a CI/CD system, along with its own persistent storage. It embodies the philosophy of building each package/version combination, when possible, and storing all the relevant artifacts. These artifacts include build logs, Source Bill of Materials (SBOMs), Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), and related information. Then, as the packages are ported to the platform, we store and organize the information so that all future visitors to the Open Source Edge portal can browse the catalog of ported packages, evaluate their build logs, review their SBOMs, and determine whether the CVE profile meets their needs.
Open Source Edge – A tool for everyone
Open Source Edge is publicly available at https://open-source-edge.developerfirst.ibm.com. Open Source Edge supports a variety of user roles. As an unauthenticated user, you can search for packages that are already supported by IBM Power. To begin your journey as a consumer or contributor, simply log in using your IBM credentials. By default, you are granted a consumer role. A consumer role allows you to search for ported packages, request specific packages or versions, submit feedback, and more.
As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Open Source Edge can be your solution to determine availability of key dependencies for your application on Power. Open Source Edge makes it easy to search simply by package name or version and evaluate the SBOM and CVEs to assess whether a package is suitable for use in your application.
As a customer, you may be building a bespoke solution or simply searching for a key package for a specific purpose, be it a database, a programming language, or a particular library. Open Source Edge lets you find or request what you need.
As an open source developer, you may have your dependencies on other open source packages and looking to find the status of those packages on Power. This tool will give you deeper insight into what’s currently available.
Open Source Edge is a miniature ecosystem of its own, connecting developers with GitHub repositories, patches, CI/CD pipelines, build results, and all the tools needed to track the porting of a package to Power. Open Source Edge uses a number of automatic processes, strict templates, and a dedicated team of open-source package maintainers, developers, and security analysts to ensure all available packages are tested for quality, security, and vulnerabilities.
Evolution in progress
Open Source Edge is a new service from IBM, but the underlying technology has been in use by the Power team for a couple of years now. The Linux on Power team has been porting products and packages to Power for many years now and has experience with porting over 40,000 open source projects (not including those delivered by a distribution). This portal currently has integrated only a small subset of those total packages, although we expect that number to grow significantly over the next year or two.
The tool’s evolution was driven by a need to manage “way too many open source projects” with “way too few developers” - a pretty common problem in some circles. Our goal was to focus on pattern recognition, templating, a variety of automation techniques, and a series of internal standardization to enable a couple of developers to port tens of thousands of packages to Linux on Power. The result is a portal which we’ll let you judge for yourself – but it has enabled us to keep pace with customers who happily take everything we have ported and keep asking for more. Not a terrible problem to have, but it does keep us busy!
Looking ahead, we expect to make further announcements around capability, capacity, and dare we say, a hefty infusion of AI into the process (with a fair bit of Human Intelligence guiding that AI!) to continue to automate and simplify the process of enabling open source software on distinct hardware architectures.
Get the Edge - Give it a try!
We encourage you to try some basic searches with the tool as it is today. As you explore further, you may find yourself wanting to unlock more features and move up through the available roles and capabilities. To take advantage of the additional capabilities, you’ll need an IBMid to sign in, and you can request additional privileges within the tool.
Become a maintainer and start contributing
IBMers use this tool as a part of enabling products and offerings to Power today. As a non-IBMer, you may also have a reason to maintain one or more packages, and to do so, we have a role of “maintainer” which you can request from the portal itself. As a maintainer you will be able to add and manage packages directly through the portal. The maintainer role also enables you to monitor distro repos, CIs, PRs.
If you are interested to know more about this incredible tool, or have questions about the onboarding process, please leave comments here on the IBM TechXchange community and we’ll get back to you! We hope that you’ll be interested and excited enough to create an IBMid and explore the additional roles and eventually help maintain your favorite project for Linux on Power as well!
Credits
- Gerrit Huizenga (gerrit@us.ibm.com)
- Hiro Miyamoto (miyamotoh@us.ibm.com)
- Nikhil Kalbande (nkalband@us.ibm.com)
- Priya Seth (sethp@us.ibm.com)
- And the Entire Open Source Edge team!