Feature Overview

As part of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) 4.22 release, Red Hat is introducing a "dual-stream" strategy, supporting both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 and RHEL 10 as the underlying operating system for the cluster nodes.

This feature specifically targets the Bare Metal Operator (BMO) to ensure it can successfully inspect, provision, and manage bare metal hosts using RHEL 10 CoreOS (RHCOS), while maintaining full feature parity and backward compatibility with RHEL 9 CoreOS. This enhancement ensures that customers can leverage new hardware capabilities supported by RHEL 10 while retaining the option to run RHEL 9 on hardware where RHEL 10 may not yet be certified or supported.

Goals

The primary goal is to enable the Bare Metal Operator to seamlessly handle the provisioning lifecycle of bare metal hosts regardless of whether the target OS is based on RHEL 9 or RHEL 10.

Primary Persona: Cluster Administrator / Infrastructure Architect

Expected Outcomes:

• Dual-Version Support: Administrators can provision OCP 4.22 clusters using either RHEL 9 or RHEL 10.
• Hardware Awareness: The inspection phase correctly identifies hardware compatibility, flagging components that are deprecated or unsupported in RHEL 10.
• Feature Parity: All existing BMO capabilities (RAID configuration, firmware updates, virtual media attachment) function identically on RHEL 10 as they do on RHEL 9.

Requirements

1. Feature parity for BMO on OCP with RHEL 9 and RHEL 10.

Use Cases

Scenario 1: RHEL 10 Greenfields Installation

As a Cluster Administrator,

I want to install a new OCP 4.22 cluster on the latest generation hardware using RHEL 10,

Scenario 2: Mixed Architecture (Dual Stream)

As an Infrastructure Architect,

I want to maintain a cluster with one MachineConfigPool running RHEL 9 (for older hardware) and another running RHEL 10 (for new high-performance compute nodes),

Out of Scope

Links

• Master Ticket: OCPSTRAT-1150 - [Dual stream] Support two major versions of RHEL CoreOS in a single OCP release & cluster
• Bare Metal Operator Repository:[ https://github.com/openshift/cluster-baremetal-operator|https://github.com/openshift/cluster-baremetal-operator]
• Metal3/Ironic Upstream:[ https://github.com/metal3-io|https://github.com/metal3-io]