Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:37:00 GMT
Moshe Bar has announced that the openMosix project is ending because “The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (SSI) Clustering less of a factor in computing. The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects”.
Moshe is behind the Qumranet startup that is developing Linux kernel virtual machine (KVM).
This loss of openMosix strikes me as a shame. I rather liked the idea of a single system image (extreme NUMA?), especially when combined with virtualization. Why not have a 64-way SMP box where groups of 4 to 8 CPUs are actually independent machines. CPUs could be added on the fly and parts of the “machine” could even be migrated to new hosts without impacting services.
I’m surprised that there isn’t demand / market for this but I guess there really isn’t, Virtual Iron used to offer single system image clustering (or should be call it aggregation) prior to their switch to the Xen hypervisor as well.
See announcement on openMosix mailing list and check out the openMosix website if you’re interested in more information.
Posted in Kernel, openMosix / Mosix | 1 comment
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 27 Apr 2007 03:51:00 GMT
Kernel 2.6.21 was released yesterday, a few of the more interesting highlights:
- VMI now in default kernel (this is VMware’s layer on top of paravirt_ops), theoretically a fully paravirtualized Linux kernel on top of VMware might be do-able now
- updated KVM code which includes some paravirt_ops support and live migration
- clockevents and dynticks
The dynamic clock tick stuff is best covered over at LWN (see Clockevents and dyntick). This could have positive impact on power consumption and performance (particularly in virtualized environments). It will be interesting to see if certain virtual environments can now keep accurate time with a kernel such as this.
Posted in Kernel, VMware, KVM, Paravirtualization | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:08:00 GMT
Coinciding with superbowl Sunday is the release of kernel 2.6.20. From Linus’ announcement:
As ICD head analyst Walter Dickweed put it: “Releasing a new kernel on
Superbowl Sunday means that the important ‘pasty white nerd’
constituency finally has something to do while the rest of the country
sits comatose in front of their 65” plasma screens”.
The big features for 2.6.20 (at least for virtualization nerds) are paravirtualization support (x86) and KVM support (x86 and x86_64).
Posted in Kernel, KVM, Paravirtualization | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT
We briefly mentioned lhype back in November (see lhype hypervisor). Since November the project would appear to have been renamed to lguest.
LWN recently published An introduction to lguest, it’s worth a read if these things interest you.
Update: lguest homepage is at http://lguest.ozlabs.org/.
Posted in Kernel, Paravirtualization, lguest | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:28:00 GMT
Recently Avi Kivity posted to linux-kernel a patchset that adds save/resume support to KVM. See email at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/467458.
I have given KVM a run under Ubuntu and while it did work (I ran both CentOS 4 and Windows XP as guests) things were decidedly slow. One would assume that as development progresses on KVM this situation will improve.
KVM would certainly not appear to be the toy variety of virtualization like lhype. Simply considering the founders and backing of KVM one would assume that there is significant functionality and performance to be had from KVM down the road.
Qumranet (the company driving KVM) has as it’s founder Moshe Bar, Moshe is founder of the OpenMosix project and was one of the co-founders of XenSource. One would expect that very interesting things are on their way from this company …
Posted in Kernel, KVM | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:08:00 GMT
In case anyone missed it (like myself) you may be interested in yet another hypervisor.
Rusty Russell is working on what he describes as “a trivial in-kernel hypervisor”. See email at http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/virtualization/2006-November/001794.html.
This hypervisor is an in-kernel hypervisor and is meant as a demo for paravirt-ops – of course the Linux kernel started of as a toy project as well didn’t it?
Posted in Kernel | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:57:00 GMT
The KVM project website is now up. For those interested in more details see the KVM Whitepaper.
One would wonder if hypervisors are losing their relevancy. With UML already in the kernel and KVM hopefully on the way the kernel already has the native ability to create a “virtual machine” (at least in some sense of the word). The argument against maintaining NUMA, SMP, multi-core support, etc. in both a hypervisor and the kernel makes a lot of sense to me.
KVM is now included in Andrew Morton’s -mm kernels, see announcement for 2.6.19-rc5-mm1.
Posted in Kernel, KVM | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:28:00 GMT
Kir Kolyshkin provides a good write-up on his blog detailing the OS-level virtualization patches that are going into the 2.6.19 kernel.
I mentioned these patches last week in News from 2.6.19 article but Kir certainly provides more detailed coverage. Also I couldn’t agree more with Kir, it is great to see that the patches are coming from a variety of contributors – better code and a wider understanding are sure to result.
Read Kir’s post at http://community.livejournal.com/openvz/10141.html.
Posted in Kernel, Containers | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT
Some good news is appearing in the changelogs for the upcoming 2.6.19 kernel. Quite a few features useful for virtualization and general clustering:
- GFS2 cluster filesystem is likely to be added (see http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/)
- OCFS2 cluster filesystem will lose it’s “experimental” monicker
- groundwork for container based virtualization (namespace patches for utsname and SYSV IPC)
- some paravirt patches also appear likely to be included (paravirt will allow paravirtualized kernels to run under multiple hypervisors – eventually)
- UML patches (doesn’t look like anything major)
- reiser4 – nah just kidding – maybe in 2.6.20
You can read Andrew Morton’s email titled Patch: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans for details on other potential kernel improvements.
It’s great to see that the kernel will soon include 2 production ready (?) cluster file systems. It would be good to hear from anyone who has extensive testing with either OCFS2 or GFS2, I myself have done some minor testing with OCFS2 and found that if the stars were correctly aligned it functioned as expected.
Posted in Kernel, Containers | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 21 Apr 2006 01:53:00 GMT
The Register weighed in today on the ongoing saga of getting paravirtualizationn officially supported in the mainline kernel:
A battle as to how Linux will handle future virtualization software from the likes of VMware and Xen has moved from a war of words to a war of indecision. The major parties involved – including Linux kernel maintainers – agree that a compromise over the virtualization interface must be reached, but no one seems to know exactly how to achieve this goal.
I have covered this topic briefly a few times in the past month, the register goes into quite a lot of detail and it’s well worth the read.
Read original article here.
Posted in Xen, Kernel, VMware | no comments | no trackbacks
