Dear CF Community,

Over the next few weeks, the Diego and Buildpacks teams will be working
together to extract a new BOSH release for the cflinuxfs2 rootfs/stack out
of the Diego BOSH release. The Buildpacks team has been doing an amazing
job of publishing new rootfs images in response to CVEs, and this
separation will make it easier for all Diego deployment operators to update
to those latest rootfs images without having to update their other
releases. We've already taken advantage of the same kind of separation
between Garden-Linux and Diego when addressing some recent Garden CVEs, and
we're looking forward to having that flexibility with the rootfs image as
well.

Once completed, the release extraction will mean a couple of minor changes
for Diego deployment operators:

- You'll have one more release to upload alongside the Diego,
Garden-Linux, and etcd BOSH releases to deploy your Diego cluster. The
Diego release tarball itself will be much smaller, as it will no longer
include the rootfs image that accounts for about 70% of its current size.
- If you use the spiff-based manifest-generation script in the
diego-release repo to produce your manifest, that's all you'll have to do!
If you're hand-rolling your manifests, you will have one or two BOSH
properties to add or move, and an entry to change in the list of job
templates on the Diego Cell VMs.

We'll call out these changes explicitly in the Diego release notes on
GitHub when the time comes.

Just as we do with the Garden-Linux and etcd releases today, the Diego
team will also attach a recent final cflinuxfs2-rootfs release tarball to
each final Diego release we publish on GitHub, so it will be easy for
consumers to get a validated set of default 'batteries' to plug into Diego.
We'll also work with the CF Release Integration team to make sure that when
the most recent rootfs image passes tests against Diego in their
integration environments, its release version is recorded in the Diego/CF
compatibility record, at
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-cf-compatibility/blob/master/compatibility-v2.csv
.

If you would like to track our progress, please follow the
'cflinuxfs2-release-extraction' epic in the Diego tracker (
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/epic/show/2395419) and the 'bosh-release'
label in the Buildpacks tracker (
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/1042066/search?q=label%3A%22bosh-release%22
).

Thanks,
Eric Malm, CF Runtime Diego PM