Subject: [LON-CAPA-dev] [Fwd: [Osdl_associates] OSDL's March, 2003 Newsletter]

From: Gerd Kortemeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 19:16:24 -0500

Maybe one fine day we are "enterprise"  ...

Subject: [Osdl_associates] OSDL's March, 2003 Newsletter
From: OSDL News <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: 13 Mar 2003 16:01:29 -0800
List-Id: OSDL Associates Distribution List <osdl_associates.lists.osdl.org>

OSDL March, 2003 Newsletter

Table of Contents

1. OSDL's Migration to the 2.5 Kernel
2. Engineering Update
3. News from the Carrier Grade Linux Working Group
4. Data Center Linux Update
5. Words of Witham

---

1. OSDL's Operational Testing of the 2.5 Kernel

Bob Knopp ([email-masked])
Operations Manager

Whenever a new operating system, or a significantly changed OS 
becomes available, IT shops  view it with some interest and no 
small amount of skepticism.  After all, it's new, it probably has 
no "real world" miles on it.  The common axiom for OS upgrades is: 
stay at least one revision behind the bleeding edge.  Makes sense 
to me: let someone else bet their enterprise on it.  Of course, 
it is never that easy.  There is often something very compelling 
about the new OS  that seems to make the risk worth taking.  
We feel that the Linux 2.6 kernel will be  just such a piece of 
new software - If only there were someone willing to try it out 
first to show us all that it works.

The staff at OSDL has been involved with development and testing 
of 2.5 since the beginning and we've noticed that it seems to be 
very stable for a development tree.  So good, in fact, that we 
think it is ready to be tested in a production environment.  
We have planned and begun execution of a project to test the 2.5 
kernel in our data center using our production environment.  
The project includes lots of testing and lots of escape hatches 
so we don't run recklessly off the edge.  We began with some of 
the simpler, less critical servers and, as we build confidence, 
are moving to the more complex servers.  Today we have several 
servers running 2.5 and within a month we'll have most of the 
data center migrated to 2.5.

A change of this magnitude, in a data center, requires very 
careful planning for each server.  We are migrating slowly 
because the stakes are high.  We will see the payoff when we can 
point to our data center and say "Yes, it is a development kernel 
but it is stable enough to use day to day already."  Watch 
upcoming issues of this newsletter for progress reports.

---

2. Engineering Update
   Linux Kernel/User Communication and sysfs-related Papers at OLS

John Cherry ([email-masked])
Engineering Manager

Pat Mochel will be presenting a paper on Linux Kernel/User 
Communication at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, July 23-26, 2003.

The Linux kernel has several mechanisms for delivering device and 
subsystem notification messages to user space.  /sbin/hotplug is 
the recommended choice since it provides a relatively simple 
interface for kernel users, and a relatively simple plug-in 
architecture for user space policy.  The evolution of the driver 
model in 2.5 has centralized the /sbin/hotplug calls, making it 
easier for subsystems to provide user notification.

Pat's talk will discuss the relative benefits that /sbin/hotplug 
has over other existing notification mechanisms, such as procfs, 
sysfs, and device nodes. It will also cover some of the shortcomings
of /sbin/hotplug in hopes of uncovering a better solution for 2.7 
and future kernels.

The New Driver Model and sysfs at OLS

Last year, Pat presented a paper on the new driver model and the 
sysfs representation of kernel data structures.  This year, several 
of the presenters are basing their talks entirely on the driver 
model and/or sysfs, or they are incorporating the driver model 
and/or sysfs into their topics.

Papers based on the device model to be presented at OLS include:

Integrating DMA into the Generic Device Model (James Bottomley)

Porting Device Drivers to 2.6 (Jonathan M. Corbet)

Power Management and Device Discovery on Embedded Systems 
(David W. Gibson)

udev - A Userspace Implementation of devfs (Greg Kroah-Hartman)

---

3. News from the Carrier Grade Linux Working Group

Mika Kukkonen ([email-masked])
Carrier Grade Linux Roadmap Coordinator

We have been working on the version 2 specs, and are about to 
publish our first public drafts.  You can expect to see them by 
the end of March.

These are early drafts, and we're releasing them with the philosophy
of "publish early, publish often."  We expect the documents to 
expand, encompassing missing content, and change, as comments 
come in.

As we did not release public drafts during the version 1 
specification process, this is a significant change in the CGL 
specification process.  I am eagerly waiting to hear from the 
community regarding these drafts.

The specifications are currently divided into three pieces, 
addressing security, clustering and a list of individual features 
falling under no one major category.  These three documents will be 
combined in the final version into a single document.

Announcements regarding these documents and other updates will be 
sent to the cgl_info mailing list.  You can join this list at:

http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/cgl_info

All feedback on the specs should be sent to our public discussion 
list, cgl_discussion.

Join this list at:

http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/cgl_discussion

I welcome all feedback and questions.  Send them to me at 
[email-masked].

---

4. Data Center Linux Update

Stephen Hemminger ([email-masked])
Data Center Linux Roadmap Coordinator

Linux 2.5 Kernel Conduit Update

A Linux "conduit" kernel source tree is maintained containing 
projects covered by the DCL and CGL requirements.  This source tree 
tracks the latest kernels from kernel.org and includes features on 
the Data Center Linux roadmap plus updates needed to boot the kernel 
on our test machines.

Highlights of changes since last month's update:

The "-osdl" and "-dcl" trees have been merged.  Having separate 
trees was a temporary measure until the NUMA and hi-res timers were 
merged to the base kernel.  In the future, the single kernel tree 
will be referred to as the "-osdl" kernel.

We've added the Complete Fair Queuing and Anticipatory Scheduler 
from the -mm tree.

To choose the scheduler via the kernel boot command line, choose 
one of:

Anticipatory Scheduler (AS):

	elevator=as

Complete Fairness Queuing (CFQ) scheduler:

	elevator=cfq

Deadline Scheduler:

	elevator=deadline

...if you specify no scheduler option, the Deadline Scheduler is 
the default.

NOTE: The anticipatory scheduler is experimental and may not boot 
on some systems.

Here is some more detail on the changes since the last newsletter:
 
2.5.63-osdl3 -

Align with latest Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD)
Update to latest AS scheduler from 2.5.63-mm2
Make defconfig turn on Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) and Linux Kernel
Crash Dump (LKCD) - (Stephen Hemminger)
 
2.5.63-osdl2 -

Make the default IO scheduler the Deadline Scheduler (Stephen Hemminger)
Improved flock bug fix (Matthew Wilcox)

2.5.63-osdl1 - 

Updates to the Megaraid 2 driver - (Matt Domsch, Mark Haverkamp)
CPU Hot Plug - (Zwane Mwaikambo)
Complete Fair Queuing (CFQ) disk scheduler - (Jens Axboe)
Anticipatory Scheduler - (Nick Piggin)
Pentium Performance Counters - (Mikael Pettersson)
Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD) - (Matt Robinson, LKCD team)
Kernel Exec (Kexec) - (Eric W. Biederman)
Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) -  (Karim Yaghmour)
Kernel Config (ikconfig) - (Randy Dunlap)
Improved boot time TSC synchronization - (Jim Houston)
RCU statistics  - (Dipankar Sarma)
Scheduler tunables - (Robert Love)

The latest release of the tree is available from:

	http:/sourceforge.net/projects/osdldcl

...or from BitKeeper:

	bk://bk.osdl.org/linux-2.5-osdl

...or the OSDL Patch Lifecycle Manager
(http://www.osdl.org/cgi-bin/plm/)

OSDL DCL Kernel Roadmap Update

The roadmap continues to evolve.  Right now, the DCL Working Group 
is assembling a list of features for the 2.7 kernel, and we'll be 
presenting them to the Linux Kernel Summit this summer.  You can 
see the current roadmap at:

http://www.osdl.org/docs/dcl_roadmap.pdf

If you have questions about the -osdl tree, the DCL roadmap or the 
Data Center Linux working group, contact me at [email-masked].

---
 
5. Words of Witham

Timothy Witham ([email-masked])
Lab Director

Testing in the Linux environment.  

OSDL has made a public announcement of the DBT tests, and you can 
find this announcement and more information on the osdl.org site.  
These are engineering tests intended to bring to the Linux 
development environment the same type of database performance tools 
that are used by proprietary operating system vendors.  While this 
is a good start they are only a start.

In February I visited a major IT shop that is moving to Linux.  
One of the main subjects of discussion was how could this IT shop 
participate in the community.  A possibility that came up was 
taking some of the internal tests  that they have developed for 
sizing and analysis of their internal workloads and making them 
available in the same manner as the DBT tests.  This would have a 
benefit to the community of bringing "real world" database tests 
to the open source community.

You might ask me, "As an IT shop why would I want to do this?" 

The short answer is: What better way to ensure that Linux supports 
your environment correctly than having your environment be one of 
the tests used by the Linux development community to determine the 
proper levels of performance for new features?

-- 
OSDL News <[email-masked]>
Open Source Development Labs, Inc.
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