Linux kernel

Brave new LinuxCon

I’ve been in Portland, Ore., this week attending the inaugural LinuxCon, hosted by the Linux Foundation. The event was a bigger draw than the organizers had anticipated, with about 600 attendees registered, making the WiFi in the rooms a bit spotty and the keynote hall a bit crowded, but all in all more interest in Linux is a good thing. The sessions have been a mix of big picture Linux evangelism to detailed technical sessions for developers with the weakest area being sessions that were designed to attract the systems administrator set.

Linux from the kernel to the big picture
Highlights so far have included a kernel maintainer panel discussion featuring Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds, Jon Corbet of LWN.net, Chris Wright from Red Hat, IBM’s Ted Ts’o, Novell’s Greg Kroah-Hartmann and moderator James Bottomley. While many positive things were said about the panel discussion, one sentence uttered by Torvalds got the most attention.

“We’re getting bloated and huge, and yes it’s a problem,” said Torvalds in reference to the size of the kernel. “I would love to say that we had a plan. Our icache footprint is scary.”
Continued »

Researchers boot one million Linux kernels as virtual machines

In a feat of Linux strength, computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., announced that they had run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. Previously, researchers had only been able to run up to 20,000 kernels concurrently. The scientists used virtual machine (VM) technology and its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration.

The aim of the project is to model malicious botnets, which are often difficult to analyze because they are geographically spread all over the world, explains Sandia’s Ron Minnich. The more kernels that can be run at once, said Minnich, the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem. “Eventually, we would like to be able to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, in order to virtualize and monitor a cyber attack,” he said.

Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer — at a similar scale as a botnet — would allow researchers to see how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks. “We can get control at a level we never had before,” said Minnich.
Continued »

New OS game changer: Hannah Montana Linux

I try to use Twitter to stay on top of breaking Linux and IT news, but sometimes I run across a gem like this that isn’t necessarily newsworthy, but is quite humorous (or RFLMAO-worthy). Today, following on the heels of the big announcement about Google Chrome, we learned about Hannah Montana Linux (or HML).

Tounge-firmly-in-cheek, Liam Green-Hughes said, “Didn’t see this coming - but it is the top development in operating systems this year!”

While some were arguing about the timing and value of Google Chrome, few could argue about the value of HML. On Wednesday, some were complaining that Google made its announcement about Chrome without having a fully developed OS, or without having finished the Chrome browser for Linux and Mac OSX. But there were almost no complaints about HML today.

Regarding Google Chrome OS, Clay Shirky was wistful about the good old days when Google would finish a product before releasing it:
“Remember, Back In The Day, when Google used to build stuff, *then* announce it? I miss those days. *cough*Wave*cough*ChromeOS”

Shirky’s sentiment was popular enough to be “RT”ed (retweeted, or forwarded) multiple times on Wednesday by other Twitter users.

But not so with HML… Ok, well HML hasn’t been met in the Twittersphere with totally open arms. My recent Twitter Search found one “Eh,” two “WTF?”, a couple of “Eeeks”, some cries about kernel defilement, an apocalyptic warning, five “LMAO”’s and quite a few retweets of Geek Brief TV’s Cali Lewis’s post:
“I am like TOTALLY installing Hannah Montana Linux on my Eee PC today!”

The most curious part of the HML announcement is the Web page, which one Twitterer pointed out was made in iWeb. The page includes the basic information about the distribution, in a strangely barely coherent format. Take for example this explanation of what it is:

So your Probably Wondering what`s the difference between Hannah Montana Linux and Windows and Mac OS X well here are some of the differences .
one : Hannah Montana Linux can`t get viruses so you could say its virus proof
two : Hannah Montana Linux is Free as in you do not have to pay for it and that you can change anything you don`t like the code is all open so its called open source
three : don`t you hate looking around the internet to find software like on Windows and Mac OS X
not on Hannah Montana Linux well you can do it like that if you wanted to…

I can look past the non-parallel list, but the utter lack of proper punctuation and leaps in logic make me wonder if this site was created by a non-English speaker, or a real, live Hannah Montana fan…

The second question I have was echoed by Clefmeister, “Isn’t that a bit of brand over-saturation?” In fact, isn’t Hannah Montana a brand controlled by one of the most powerful companies in the United States (Disney)? While it’s an open source distribution, I’m thinking the Disney lawyers may swiftly act to have it taken down. My advice is, download it quick if you want it, because I don’t think it will last long.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit wrap-up

The 3rd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held last week in San Francisco. Among the talks was a presentation by Al Gillen, program vice president, system software at IDC, titled “The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy.” The presentation was based on a white paper, sponsored by The Linux Foundation (LF), which looks at the impact of the current economic conditions on the computer industry, and how the Linux ecosystem will ride through this disruptive time. The presentation focused on IDCs expectation that the Linux ecosystem will be less impacted by the downturn and recover more aggressively than other platforms.

Other keynotes and panels during the week were from Linux kernel developers and representatives at IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others. Thursday and Friday’s agenda included the ISV Summit, which focused on sharing the latest advancements in Linux and looking at best ways to work among the community. Other panel discussions and workgroup focus was on high-performance computing, file systems and systems management, among others.

We’re Linux video contest winner announced
The winner of the “We’re Linux” video contest was also announced at the summit. Amitay Tweeto, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Israel, beat out 90 contest entrants to win the grand prize for his video “What Does It Mean To Be Free?” Tweeto will receive a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

Two runner-ups were also announced:

• Runner-up: “The Origin”
• Runner-up: “Linux Pub”

A combination of community votes and a panel of judges determined the winners:

• Matt Asay, CNET blogger and executive at Alfresco, Inc.;
• Larry Augustin, venture capitalist and former chairman of VA Software,
  and Linux Foundation board member;

• Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager;
• Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager;
• Melinda Mettler, director, School of Advertising at the Academy of Art
  University; and

• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media, Inc.

openSUSE Build Service added to Linux Developer Network
On Wednesday, Novell and the Linux Foundation jointly announced that the openSUSE Build Service will be added to the Linux Developer Network (LDN). The openSUSE Build Service enables developers to package software for all major Linux distributions, and is used to provide transparent infrastructure for the creation of the entire openSUSE distribution. Additionally, the openSUSE Project, a Novell sponsored and community-supported open source project, announced a new release of the openSUSE Build Service with support for compiling for the ARM platform.

The Linux Foundation will be providing an interface to the openSUSE Build Service via the Linux Developer Network site, so that developers can create packages for all major Linux distributions via LDN. The build service enables developers to create packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, in addition to openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. The addition of the openSUSE Build Service to the LDN compliments LDN’s popular AppChecker application, which enables developers to create portable applications for Linux. The build service is a perfect tool for LDN’s overall goal of assisting developers to deliver these portable applications.

The openSUSE project is also releasing the 1.6 version of the build service that includes support for compiling packages for the ARM platform, which is primarily used for embedded devices. The support for cross-architecture build support means that developers can create RPM or Debian packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This work has been contributed by 5e DataSoft GmbH, working as part of the openSUSE community to add support for embedded devices based on ARM. 5e provides solutions based on openSUSE.

The latest release of the build service also includes support for building openSUSE appliances, live CDs, installable USB images, Xen images and VMware images. Developers can now create their own custom openSUSE distribution using the build service.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager, said, “This is the culmination of years of work by the openSUSE Project. The openSUSE Build Service has always been intended as a tool that would accelerate the general adoption of Linux. It’s gratifying to see the build service becoming part of the Linux Developer Network and being embraced by the larger community.”

Collective Linux development model will be tough to beat, report says

The humble penguin is mascot of quite a treasure.

According to an updated Linux Foundation study, to build from scratch today, the Linux kernel would cost $1.4 billion; a typical Linux distro, $1.2 billion. In addition, Fedora 9, the current community version of Red Hat’s operating system, would cost a whopping $10.8 billion to replicate in current dollars.

The study also quoted a report from Framingham, Mass.-based IDC that appraised the collective value of the entire Linux computing ecosystem at $25 billion. That’s quite a trajectory for Linux Torvalds’ kernel in just 17 years.

The conclusion underlines the obvious: Linux has become a computing powerhouse, running everything from tiny mobile devices to the largest banks and supercomputers. While the software’s open code and modular construction are inherent advantages, the massive Linux community of individual and corporate developers who share the task and cost of improving the software are key to the platform’s success, the report concludes. In contrast, proprietary software companies, which must shoulder their development costs in isolation, will ultimately be hard put to compete with the open source model, the report concludes.

No kidding. As far as this blog is concerned, the report and its conclusions preach to the converted.

Navy’s ship cancelation a blow for real-time Linux, IBM

The U.S. Navy’s cancelation of its $20 billion Zumwalt destroyer contract last week because of a 50% price hike is disappointing for the Linux community and surely must be for IBM The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer company developed Java-based, real-time capabilities to the Linux kernel specifically for the Zumwalt to ensure that all shipboard systems will run with precision timing, particularly battle systems. The Zumwalt’s unified computing system, developed by general contractor Raytheon Co.. in Waltham, Mass., runs on an IBM BladeCenter and IBM x86 servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Since the 2005-2006 Navy design undertaking, IBM has incorporated its technology in IBM WebSphere Real Time, a computing environment for running real-time Linux applications, and recently won an innovation award for its real-time kernel project at this year’s Red Hat Summit.

Now, after the completion of only two destroyers, the contract has been aborted, which surely means a hefty chunk of lost hardware sales for IBM but, more significantly, a step backward for shipboard computing technology, in general, and Linux in particular.

IBM spokesman Mike Darcy said he didn’t know the impact of cancelation on future IBM revenues but said that IBM will continue to work with other customers, defense and financial sectors among them, as interest “continues to grow” in real-time Linux operations.

“Real-time Linux will continue,” Darcy said. “This [the Zumwalt project] is a great showcase for Linux technology.”

Raytheon spokesman Jonathan Kasle agreed.

“We don’t believe the Navy can afford to put old technologies onto any ships,” he told the Boston Globe last week. “Zumwalt technologies advance mission capabilities to address current and evolving threats and support … lower ship personnel levels and lower operating costs. These technologies can be leveraged for future or existing ships.”

According to Darcy’s general reference to current “defense” customers, it appears that the military is already doing so. Let’s hope so. Reverting to old technology on new Navy ships is not the way to go.

Red Hat previews virtual management tool

At a mid-morning session during the Red Hat Summit in Boston today, a standing-room only crowd of more than 125 attendees got a preview of oVirt, a “next-generation open source virtualization management solution.”

Currently in beta, oVirt comprises two components: oVirt Managed Node, which is an embedded hypervisor based on a Linux kernel and KVM; and oVirt Server Suite, an administrative console that includes a Web interface and has functionality for tasks related to virtual machine management, such as status monitoring, performance monitoring and visualization and authentication.

With oVirt, IT administrators get a picture of “what’s going on in your server room from a virtualization perspective,” said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. The current generation of virtualization management tools, contends Stevens, fall short for customers because they are proprietary and do not integrate into the enterprise.

The oVirt infrastructure integrates with several open source projects, including libvirt for virtual machine management, FreeIPA for directory services, Cobbler and Koan for provisioning, and collectd for performance data collection.

Currently oVirt enables IT administrations to collect data from managed hosts; eventually Stevens said that oVirt will include automation capabilities to allow IT administrators to establish service-level agreements around physical and virtual machines and migrate machines accordingly based on those levels.

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 released

Last Friday saw the release of the Linux Kernel version 2.6.24. This new version does not include anything spectacular (Linus’ words, not mine), but does include some updates to network drivers. These improvements will assuredly make some users experiencing network issues happy. You can go to http://www.kernel.org to download and build your new kernel.

But should you? Is there ever a reason to build your own kernel and not just wait for it to come down the pipe from your distribution’s software repositories? For the most part, no, you should not need to build your own kernel for enterprise Linux installations these days. Most kernels that come with stock Linux installations such as Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu are fine.

However, some occasions require building a new kernel, for example:

- Licensing changes, which forces one to redact certain bits from the stock kernel (see my previous SVV blog post on 2.6.23 and VMware)

- Support for a new CPU ID that is not yet present in the Kernel

- Performance improvement for servers tasked with performing intense calculations

Got any other good reasons for building a kernel? Send them to us.

Ubuntu Releases Alpha Version of Server 8.04

The first alpha release from the growingly popular Ubuntu Linux is now available. The build is clearly marked as a not ready for prime time player, but offers a sneak peak at the next release, 8.04, expected in April 2008. You can also publicly contribute to the bug tracking mechanism should you choose.  I installed the alpha release, Hardy Heron Alpha-1 which was generally indistinguishable from other Ubuntu releases, namely the gutsy 7.10 release.

Some takeaway notes about this alpha release are that it includes Xorg 7.3 for the X Window System manager and pulls in some Debian changes as well.  It uses kernel 2.6.22, which is the same as gutsy 7.10.  Comparatively, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is on the 2.6.18 kernel and Novell Suse is on the 2.6.16.21 kernel.  If you use Ubuntu 8.04 Server, keep in mind that packages may detect a newer version of the kernel and want to recompile.  A good example is VMWare tools for guest operating systems. 

Canonical Ltd. does not support the alpha releases of Ubuntu, which is to be expected.   When 8.04 is released after the community development process is complete, Canonical will support the end-state product.

More information about the Ubuntu release can be found at:  http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/alpha1

It’s 10 o’clock. Did you remember to turn packet forwarding on?

So I am on a VPN kick lately; I wonder if it shows? I spent the last week setting up and tweaking Openswan on an Ubuntu box in order to allow me to connect to my home network with my MacBook Pro. I finally got it working — you can see some of the fun gotchas you might run into when using Leopard to connect to Openswan at my own blog — but I could not actually see anything on my home network. Well, it turns out I seem to be a special case. (My wife is insisting that I had a prefix “head” to case). My VPN box was never previously a part of my home network topology. It was a DNS and DHCP server, but it played no role in packet switching or forwarding. I guess most people install VPN software on a Linux box that is already a router of some sort. Thus the Kernel did not have packet forwarding turned on and the VPN server was not forwarding packets to the rest of the network.

To turn packet forwarding on simply issue this command:

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

After you do this the packets will flow! Of course, I would have known about this a lot sooner if I had used the “ipsec verify” command. This command will check your system to see if it is properly configured to run Openswan and tell what you need to do in order to get it into a ready state.

Hope this helps!