CNCF Special Purpose Operating System Working Group Participation

[rajaskakodkar]

Hello Photon maintainers,

As part of CNCF TAG Runtime, I am reaching out to let you know that there has been an interest in the community, which includes folks from Flatcar and Bottlerocket, to collaborate by creating a special purpose operating system working group under the CNCF umbrella. It would be great for you to participate in this working group for defining common standards and best practices across this space.

If you are interested, please join #wg-sp-os on CNCF slack. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you!

[rajaskakodkar]

cc @raravena80 @helayoty @nikhita

[dcasota]

Accordingly to https://github.com/cncf/tag-runtime, CNCF tag runtime already has two members from VMware (?).

[stmcginnis]

There are some VMware folks that are members of tag-runtime, but I think Rajas wanted to point out specifically the Special Purpose Operating System working group. We don't have any representation from Photon or VMware there, beyond the TAG liaison involvement.

https://github.com/cncf/tag-runtime/blob/main/wg/sp-os.md

Not sure if it is of interest or not, but any participation is welcome.

[dcasota]

Here some thoughts.

From a regulations perspective, the management of operational risks and assurance operational resilience includes ensuring PII principals for PII sharing, transfer and disclosure. Contributing along tag-runtimes does not represent an information barrier, but might become legally questionable with respect to AI risk framework implementations.

For a vendor's Linux-centric OS working group, entrusting AI with responsibility for tag runtime operations appears highly beneficial. However, there are different starting points:

• computer on modules kit specific: e.g. torizon os
• hyperscalers: azure - cbl mariner, vmware by broadcom - photon os, gce - container linux, aws - amazon linux, oci - oracle linux
• language-centric distros: python - flatcar, go - kairos, rust - bottlerocket
• classic distros : ubuntu, debian, rhel, centos, sles, alpine, rockylinux

There is a projected eol in 2026 for linux kernels 5.10-6.6, and recently there were some interesting CERN statements as well.

That said, the more companies are willing to participate in the same working groups, the more regulations could shift the ratio of open source os to closed source os further in favor of closed source.