[LON-CAPA-dev] [Fwd: [Osdl_associates] OSDL's March, 2003 Newsletter]
Gerd Kortemeyer
lon-capa-dev@mail.lon-capa.org
Thu, 13 Mar 2003 19:16:24 -0500
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Maybe one fine day we are "enterprise" ...
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Subject: [Osdl_associates] OSDL's March, 2003 Newsletter
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Date: 13 Mar 2003 16:01:29 -0800
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 (rknopp@osdl.org)
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 (cherry@osdl.org)
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 (mika@osdl.org)
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
mika@osdl.org.
---
4. Data Center Linux Update
Stephen Hemminger (shemminger@osdl.org)
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 shemminger@osdl.org.
---
5. Words of Witham
Timothy Witham (wookie@osdl.org)
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 <osdl_news@osdl.org>
Open Source Development Labs, Inc.
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