Cockpit 160

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 160.

Add kubevirt Virtual Machines overview

kubevirt is a project for running KVM virtual machines in Kubernetes. Cockpit’s “Cluster” (Kubernetes/OpenShift) dashboard can now show the status of these VMs in the new “Virtual Machines” menu entry. This only appears when kubevirt is installed and active:

Cluster kubevirt list

In the future this will be extended to also do operations on the VMs.

Thanks to Jakub Niedermertl for this feature!

Redesign package list on Software Updates page and show RHEL Errata

The table of available updates now looks and behaves much more consistently to other products that handle software packages, like Satellite and Welder:

  • It now only shows the first line of the description and number of fixed security issues or bugs in the table, and moves the full description and detailed bug/CVE lists into an expander.

  • It shows icons for the severity of the update, i. e. “security”, “bug fix”, or “enhancement”.

  • On Red Hat operating systems it also shows the classification of security updates and links to the corresponding Errata.

Software Updates redesign and Errata

  • PackageKit often provides the update details in Markdown format. This now gets rendered properly instead of shown verbatim in text.

Software Updates markdown

AppStream handling on Apps page

On Fedora, the Apps page now installs the appstream-data package when checking for new applications, which ships the AppStream metadata for discovering new Cockpit applications.

This Cockpit version also adds AppStream metadata for its own cockpit-sosreport package (which is not installed by default). Once appstream-data gets updated again in Fedora, cockpit-sosreport will appear on the Apps page as an available extension.

Change CPU graphs to use “100%” for a fully loaded multi-processor system

Previously, the CPU graphs on the System, Dashboard, and Containers pages were calibrated to 100% for a single CPU core, so that the graph maxed out at e. g. 400% for a system with four busy CPU cores. Now it gets scaled so that “100%” means “all cores are fully busy”, which is the behaviour of command line tools like top.

Show storage, network, and other numbers with 3 digits of precision

Previously numbers like the free space on a storage device were shown with one fractional digit only, which led to overly imprecise numbers like “0.1 GiB”. The new behaviour provices a more consistent accuracy regardless of the number’s magnitude.

Add an example bastion container

A bastion container provides Cockpit’s web service without actually logging in to the machine on which it runs, but only connects to remote hosts via ssh.

This is not a ready-to-use product for now, but we encourage you to experiment with the example and give us feedback if you have such a use case.

Try it out

Cockpit 160 is available now: