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2.6.26 on a Lenovo x61 thinkpad
It looks like the iwl driver is slightly broken in the 2.6.26 release - connections will drop-out after 10 seconds or so.
The workaround for this is to enable the config option CONFIG_IWL4965_HT.
Servicelog Updates
The servicelog package has been updated to version 1.0. This new version uses an sqlite database as a backend (instead of the Berkeley DB backend that the 0.x stream used). The primary advantage to the sqlite relational database backend is that queries of the servicelog can be performed with standard SQL queries. The –query flag [...]
Power Platform Diagnostics: Source Available
The package for performing Power platform diagnostics, ppc64-diag, has just been open sourced under the Eclipse Public License. Much of what I discussed in my previous post about predictive self healing is implemented in this package (and in servicelog, which is already open source).
Here are some of the advantages provided by the ppc64-diag package:
retrieval of [...]
Um, Just Who is Managing Your Public Cloud?
This article summarizes some of the recent bumps in public clouds. While these bumps are inevitable (and unenviable!) in the early stages of a new technology, they do shine the light on the management of the data center. And, as may be obvious, the people that lost their data in one case most likely have no recourse with the holders of that data. In the case of outages, "well, gee, so sorry" is a pretty weak excuse at the moment for problems in managing the public cloud.
My guess is that this will start a bit of a turn towards more conservative cloud management (that loose and free stuff looks good on paper) and that in turn may start to put a little pressure on prices or start to reduce the license/contractual assurances that current cloud providers make available.
Another thing worth noting here, Google and Amazon, two of the biggest cloud providers, have internal architectures that are designed with high availability in mind. These types of outages would not have affected their core operations, typically. However, most applications that are running in their clouds today were not architected for the same style of high availability.
Anyway, I'll continue to assert that issues like this will help foster the drive towards at least initially, private clouds, with a limited subset of workloads moving into the public clouds based on the type of workload.
It is going to be a bumpy take off into these clouds - fasten your seat belt and hope that the people getting sick along the way aren't on your plane...
BTW here are a couple of other links to recent glitches and failures such as the evaporating cloud or "oops, sorry we deleted your cloud". Some are Web 2.0, but a couple are effectively cloud computing providers which have had public failures - in large part because the data centers and applications were not designed for true high availability or had maintenance issues. And, the last of those links (thanks, Brian!) was just the typical human error problem. Even if you don't create your own cloud, you may well want to really know who is managing your cloud and how - at least until we have some higher end service level agreements available.
VMware joins the Linux Foundation
So Cloud Computing is the rage today, it is based on virtualization. Many claim that Linux and Open Source was the master key that opened the door to Cloud Computing. So, it seems very fitting that VMware has joined the Linux Foundation. The recent re-/free-pricing of VMware ESX definitely helps make core virtualization a commodity and thus makes it easier to build the more complex software solutions that ultimately will simplify information technology management over the next several years. Linux with VMware ESX, Xen, KVM, etc. now provide a powerful base platform on which to build more complex solutions which will ultimately enrich our lives and reduce the amount of time we spend managing our IT infrastructure.
Welcome to the Linux Foundation, VMware!
Welcome to the Linux Foundation, VMware!
You want to participate in an open source development community?
Then read this: http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/book/how-participate-linux-community . Kudos to Jonathan Corbet of lwn.net fame. A very good (and relatively short) booklet on how to participate in an open source community. Specifically, this is geared towards Linux, but many of the observations in here will span communities and relate to any development project which is developed where a mailing list is the primary communication medium for developers.
Definitely a good read!
How Secure is your Public Cloud, anyway?
I've been chatting with people lately a bit about the rate of uptake and adoption of these so-called "public" clouds. While I'm a big fan of the potential here, they still aren't the right thing for all workloads. There are problems with availability, security, latency, etc. which have not all been resolved. As an example, VMware was recently hit by this bug, and black hats identified some holes in Xen security. And these are surely not the last holes. Sometime around the time I was born, IBM started working with virtualization and providing very high end availability, reliability, security and such. VMware and Xen are much younger cousins which have a lot more growing up to do before they provide the security and isolation of physical machines. Of course, the push for Cloud Computing and ubiquitous virtualization will accellerate the improvements in security and isolation in these more modern hypervisors. But I probably wouldn't be putting my corporate intellectual property on a public cloud just yet. Many other workloads may be just fine but think carefully about what goes out into the public domain, er, cloud, and what you protect with those corporate firewalls.
On the other hand, those corporate firewalls give you some protection if you want to use private clouds inside your enterprise today. Those security holes mean that your own employees might get access to more information than you might have intended, but there are other things, like employment contracts, that give you some control over those types of misuses. And, unintentional access resulting from bugs at least puts your data in the hands of people you generally consider reliable.
On the other hand, those corporate firewalls give you some protection if you want to use private clouds inside your enterprise today. Those security holes mean that your own employees might get access to more information than you might have intended, but there are other things, like employment contracts, that give you some control over those types of misuses. And, unintentional access resulting from bugs at least puts your data in the hands of people you generally consider reliable.
Fixing Copy-Paste issues on Eclipse and KDE
This article describes a solution to fix a long term issue (bug?) involving copy & paste when running Eclipse on KDE.
The problem
When launching Eclipse from KDE, one might experience several types failures with cut, copy and paste actions in Eclipse. The reported misbehavior is non-deterministic, but frequent enough to degrade user experience.
Inside the editor, specially [...]
Fast ext4 fsck times
This wasn’t one of the things we were explicitly engineering for when were designing the features that would go into ext4, but one of the things which we’ve found as a pleasant surprise is how much more quickly ext4 filesystems can be checked. Ric Wheeler reported some really good fsck times that were over ten times better than ext3 using filesystems generated using what was admittedly a very artificial/synthetic benchmark. During the past six weeks, though, I’ve been using ext4 on my laptop, and I’ve seen very similar results.
This past week, while at LinuxWorld, I’ve been wowing people with the following demonstration. Using an LVM snapshot, I ran e2fsck on the root filesystem on my laptop. So using a 128 gigabyte filesystem, on a laptop drive, this is what people who got to see my demo saw:
e2fsck 1.41.0 (10-Jul-2008)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 1: Memory used: 3440k/12060k (3311k/130k), time: 17.82/ 5.52/ 1.11
Pass 1: I/O read: 233MB, write: 0MB, rate: 13.08MB/s
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 2: Memory used: 3440k/13476k (3311k/130k), time: 41.47/ 2.16/ 3.30
Pass 2: I/O read: 274MB, write: 0MB, rate: 6.61MB/s
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Peak memory: Memory used: 3440k/14504k (3311k/130k), time: 59.88/ 7.75/ 4.42
Pass 3: Memory used: 3440k/13476k (3311k/130k), time: 0.04/ 0.02/ 0.01
Pass 3: I/O read: 1MB, write: 0MB, rate: 27.38MB/s
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 4: Memory used: 3440k/6848k (3310k/131k), time: 0.25/ 0.24/ 0.00
Pass 4: I/O read: 0MB, write: 0MB, rate: 0.00MB/s
Pass 5: Checking group summary information
Pass 5: Memory used: 3440k/5820k (3310k/131k), time: 3.13/ 1.85/ 0.10
Pass 5: I/O read: 5MB, write: 0MB, rate: 1.60MB/s
779726 inodes used (9.30%)
1 non-contiguous inode (0.0%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks: 719/712/712
22706429 blocks used (67.67%)
0 bad blocks
4 large files
673584 regular files
58903 directories
1304 character device files
4575 block device files
11 fifos
1818 links
41336 symbolic links (32871 fast symbolic links)
4 sockets
--------
781535 files
Memory used: 3440k/5820k (3376k/65k), time: 63.35/ 9.86/ 4.54
I/O read: 511MB, write: 1MB, rate: 8.07MB/s
How does this compare against ext3? To answer that, I copied my entire ext4 file system to an equivalently sized partition formatted for use with ext3. This comparison is a little unfair since the ext4 file system has six weeks of aging on it, where as the ext3 filesystem was a fresh copy, so the directories are a bit more optimized. That probably explains the slightly better times in pass 2 for the ext3 file system. Still, it was no contest; the ext4 file system was almost seven times faster to check using e2fsck compared to the ext3 file system. Fsck on an ext4 filesystem is fast!
| Pass | ext3 | ext4 | |||||||||
| time (s) | I/O | time (s) | I/O | ||||||||
| real | user | system | MB read | MB/s | real | user | system | MB read | MB/s | ||
| 1 | 382.63 | 18.06 | 14.99 | 2376 | 6.21 | 17.82 | 5.52 | 1.11 | 233 | 13.08 | |
| 2 | 31.76 | 1.76 | 2.13 | 303 | 9.54 | 41.47 | 2.16 | 3.3 | 274 | 6.61 | |
| 3 | 0.03 | 0.01 | 0 | 1 | 31 | 0.04 | 0.02 | 0.01 | 1 | 27.38 | |
| 4 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.25 | 0.24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| 5 | 9.86 | 1.26 | 0.22 | 5 | 0.51 | 3.13 | 1.85 | 0.1 | 5 | 1.6 | |
| Total | 424.81 | 21.36 | 17.34 | 2685 | 6.32 | 63.35 | 9.86 | 4.54 | 511 | 8.07 | |
IBM Contributions to Novell SLES10 SP2 w Ingolf Salm
Ingolf talks about the technical highlights of IBM contributions to Novell’s SLES 10 SP2
Additional Information
- http://www.novell.com/linux/
Virtualized Linux on Power Boom
Internally within IBM we get to see a number of great adoption statistics for technologies and IBM products. One that has been increasing over time is the usage of Linux virtualized on Power Systems (e.g. POWER6 processor based servers). These systems were always considered “UNIX servers” and that was true in the old days. Today, with virtualization, how do you count a system that has 30% of its capacity dedicated to Linux partitions and 70% to AIX? How about 90% Linux, 10% AIX? The same trend for adoption of Linux on scalable systems is true for Mainframes as well. These systems offer customers a significant amount of flexibility to match workloads and applications to the best hardware without disrupting the OS, tools, etc.
Every now and then IBMers know we’ve clearly done something the competition is unlikely to ever catch up to even if we let them know it’s working. The numbers below speak for themselves. It takes commitment to drive change. To use a poker reference, if you know the odds are in your favor, go all in pre-flop or someone without the odds will potentially take you out on the river card. If Sun had a real Linux strategy, this could be Linux on UltraSPARC Tx. If HP had a real processor strategy, this could be Linux on Superdome.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2223362/virtualisation-booming-ibm
The company is reporting a threefold increase in the number of virtualised Power Systems servers sold. Sixty four per cent of Big Blue’s customers opted for a virtualised Linux setup on the new servers, compared to just 21 per cent a year ago.
“Even I was stunned by the uptake,” admitted Scott Handy, IBM’s vice president of Power Systems.
How can I get a padded jail?
Jim Zemlin is a featured speaker and panel coordinator today at LinuxworldExpo. His intro to the panel questions started with the assertion that over the years (have there really been 18 LinuxWorld Expos so far? wow) that Linux has become nearly ubiquitous, including a lot of pictures of mobile devices, servers, desktops, laptops, services, collaborations tools, etc, which are all using Linux. He talked also about initiatives, including Green data centers, Cloud Computing, etc. which are more widely enabled as a result of Linux being so prevalent and accessible within the industry. In many ways, Linux is enabling many of these emerging technologies because it provides a common basis for innovation which is easily accessible and eliminates the need to build every new initiative or product from scratch.
Jim also provided a reinforcement that the "competitor" from which we in the Linux community need to learn from today is no longer Microsoft (well, they might have a trick or two that we can still learn) but the real competitor today is Apple. Jim took a poll to see who has some sort of Apple device today and at first glance, it appeared to be the entire room -- At a Linux conference! -- had an Apple product. A little digging showed that Apple products weren't quite ubiquitous but the point was by then made. Jim also pointed out how Microsoft and Apple are finding a way to sell products that have vendor lock in. The products are not open, not easily available, controlled by a single entity and basically are a jail for consumers. Of course, he then pointed out that the Apple Jail looked a lot like a 4 star hotel room with video on demand, a great view, clean and neat, and was a jail that most of us find to be rather luxurious. The next slide, though showed the Microsoft Jail - emphasizing that the roughness of conditions were exacerbated by the fact that you were often trapped in that jail with no amentities, some very large rough looking malware types, and a raft of viruses to make your stay as unpleasant as possible. And, the wrap up was the equivalent Linux "Jail" is more like a visit to Burning Man - free and open, yeah, there may not be a lot of frills, the power might go out, but you are free to come and go as you will, you can improve your surroundings as you choose, and ultimately you can really enjoy yourself. Perhaps Burning Man is not the best analogy here, but it makes the point quite nicely.
Jim's panelists included James Bottomley of kernel community fame, Christie from the Motorola alliance providing Linux enabled cell phones, and David who helped create the (no longer available in stores) Walmart PC.
Jim also provided a reinforcement that the "competitor" from which we in the Linux community need to learn from today is no longer Microsoft (well, they might have a trick or two that we can still learn) but the real competitor today is Apple. Jim took a poll to see who has some sort of Apple device today and at first glance, it appeared to be the entire room -- At a Linux conference! -- had an Apple product. A little digging showed that Apple products weren't quite ubiquitous but the point was by then made. Jim also pointed out how Microsoft and Apple are finding a way to sell products that have vendor lock in. The products are not open, not easily available, controlled by a single entity and basically are a jail for consumers. Of course, he then pointed out that the Apple Jail looked a lot like a 4 star hotel room with video on demand, a great view, clean and neat, and was a jail that most of us find to be rather luxurious. The next slide, though showed the Microsoft Jail - emphasizing that the roughness of conditions were exacerbated by the fact that you were often trapped in that jail with no amentities, some very large rough looking malware types, and a raft of viruses to make your stay as unpleasant as possible. And, the wrap up was the equivalent Linux "Jail" is more like a visit to Burning Man - free and open, yeah, there may not be a lot of frills, the power might go out, but you are free to come and go as you will, you can improve your surroundings as you choose, and ultimately you can really enjoy yourself. Perhaps Burning Man is not the best analogy here, but it makes the point quite nicely.
Jim's panelists included James Bottomley of kernel community fame, Christie from the Motorola alliance providing Linux enabled cell phones, and David who helped create the (no longer available in stores) Walmart PC.
A tale about open source testing: part 1 - autotest
For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to write about the current state of open source testing. I want to point out some recent developments on this particular area, and what we can do to build a roadmap towards a bigger goal.
But what would be that goal?
Imagine a scenario when one GNU/Linux distribution team needs [...]
Guessing the environment where your code is executing on
This week I was working on automating some toolchain tests and I’ve realized that we could greatly reduce the amount of setup done by the tester if we do ‘automagical’ guessing of the underlying processor architecture we’re running on, as well as the hardware capabilities (sets of instructions supported). Since then I was researching about [...]
Picking the right target for the Linux Desktop
I think it has long been recognized that having a Linux desktop look "as good as" a Windows desktop has been a pretty low bar from an easy-to-use point of view. Mark Shuttleworth brought it up again at the Linux Symposium during his keynote speech (something he has clearly been thinking about for a while), and I just saw Bob Sutor bring it up again at the Next Generation Data Center keynote speech that he gave.
I think the Linux desktop has gotten a lot closer to the simplicity that the Mac offers or that Windows offers, but in either case, it still has a long way to go. There are still so many areas that I've been fighting with on an Ubuntu laptop (T61p at the moment since the display on my tried and true T41p decided to blink out for good last week). Because I have worked with Linux for a long time, I'm relatively confident that with time and enough good google searches I will resolve the problems. But boy do I rue spending the time on realizing that NetworkManager is trying to take over my wireless and doing everything it can to make sure I can never connect to a wireless access point. Or, I can use the nv driver without compiz, or the nvidia driver without suspend/hibernate. Oh, if I dig through various forums, it looks like there are possible fixes/configuration changes that might move me forward, but if those answers are out there, why does an apt-get install not just fix all those problems?
Then there are the annoyances - I put in a USB key on this box and for some reason there is a hard hang of the desktop sometimes for a minute or two and then Nautilus opens, finally. I put the same USB key in the Mac and Finder just opens. My iMac 24 isn't very mobile but when I powered it up at home, I had to choose/enter an SSID, fill in a password and select an authentication mechanism, and through three wireless routers, several reconfigs and such, it just *does the right thing*. The use cases are a little bit different but Linux still doesn't seem to do the right thing.
And these are just the basics - what about all of the more complex, cool tasks. Dragging video, editing it and copy/pasting subsets of audio or video. Managing my music library or managing TV recordings seems to be always "possible" on Linux but never easy (my MythTV stopped last time I lost power and/or had an automated upgrade).
But I think the message remains: Pick the right target for comparison, and that right target is hopefully clearly not Vista, XP or any past Windows product, but is instead the much more user friendly environment of the Mac...
I think the Linux desktop has gotten a lot closer to the simplicity that the Mac offers or that Windows offers, but in either case, it still has a long way to go. There are still so many areas that I've been fighting with on an Ubuntu laptop (T61p at the moment since the display on my tried and true T41p decided to blink out for good last week). Because I have worked with Linux for a long time, I'm relatively confident that with time and enough good google searches I will resolve the problems. But boy do I rue spending the time on realizing that NetworkManager is trying to take over my wireless and doing everything it can to make sure I can never connect to a wireless access point. Or, I can use the nv driver without compiz, or the nvidia driver without suspend/hibernate. Oh, if I dig through various forums, it looks like there are possible fixes/configuration changes that might move me forward, but if those answers are out there, why does an apt-get install not just fix all those problems?
Then there are the annoyances - I put in a USB key on this box and for some reason there is a hard hang of the desktop sometimes for a minute or two and then Nautilus opens, finally. I put the same USB key in the Mac and Finder just opens. My iMac 24 isn't very mobile but when I powered it up at home, I had to choose/enter an SSID, fill in a password and select an authentication mechanism, and through three wireless routers, several reconfigs and such, it just *does the right thing*. The use cases are a little bit different but Linux still doesn't seem to do the right thing.
And these are just the basics - what about all of the more complex, cool tasks. Dragging video, editing it and copy/pasting subsets of audio or video. Managing my music library or managing TV recordings seems to be always "possible" on Linux but never easy (my MythTV stopped last time I lost power and/or had an automated upgrade).
But I think the message remains: Pick the right target for comparison, and that right target is hopefully clearly not Vista, XP or any past Windows product, but is instead the much more user friendly environment of the Mac...
Polling files on NFS shared directories
These days we were implementing a distributed application where processes read startup information from a shared file stored in an NFS directory. Unfortunately, the approach did not work as expected, and we faced strange situations. After all, we learned that polling NFS shared directories can be quite tricky.
The original approach
Let me explain shortly the [...]
Cloud Computing paper presented at the Linuxsymposium is now available
Well, I've dropped way behind being "as it happens" with news and info, but my Cloud Computing paper is now available from the linuxsymposium.org site - my paper is about page 197 of Volume 1 I will also make the slides available to anyone that asks (stripped down a little but still a bit chunky because I went overboard on pictures of clouds a bit, oops.)
I'm currently at the Next Generation Data Center - interestingly enough there was a lot of alignment between the Cisco keynote speech and what we are working on in IBM. I'm also sitting in on the Virtualization 2.0 track where there is a lot of discussion about the pain points and progress in moving from virtualization 1.0 to virtuailzation 2.0 (btw, I do not see a crisp definition of the differences from the presenters, most just a view that virtualization is evolving - and rather slowly at that. The most appropriate quote was that the adoption cycles are much slower than the talk-about cycles. But there is clearly progress in adoption of virtualization and some of the new problems I've referred to before are also becoming more visible across the industry, such as consolidation exposing more problems in high availability and such.
All in all, the rate and pass of change related to virtualization, grid, cloud computing (oh, matrix computing came up - I have to look that one up) is constant, although pretty slow in the eyes of the technologists.
king of mustache
As Lucas “Well groomed” Meneghel already mentioned, LTC Brazil held the first King of Mustache contest (page in English now available, thanks to our mustache-adorned colleagues). As can be seen in the photo gallery, competition was fierce:
Or maybe not that much:
Yours truly also attempted to obtain the title, with what was later named the Santos Dumont look (oh well, judge for yourself):
In the end, Fred Mercury won:
Or was it Super Mario? This is still under debate.
Also Frederico, could not attend but sent this awesome picture anyway. And you can see all contestants here.
I’d like to send a big Thank You! to the people who organized this wondrous event: Alex Zanetti, André Macêdo and Paulo Vital. I had a really really good time that night!
King of Mustache 2008
Yesterday we’ve had the true Battle of the Year: contest where brave moustached men were running for the title of the LTC Brazil King of Mustache 2008. This contest is our celebration of the brave founding fathers of our nation [1], and also a celebration of life and an opportunity to get all the nerds [...]
Running eclipse based apps on Fedora 9 x86_64
Many IBM applications are based on eclipse for i386 architectures. Just some examples: Lotus Notes, Sametime, Symphony, IES (IBM eclipse SDK). However, the Fedora 9 for x86_64 architectures does not install any 32 bits libraries anymore. How shall these applications now run on Fedora 9?
One one side, these applications were designed for Linux on 32 [...]
- Planet LTC aggregates the collective public bloggings of IBM employees in IBM's Linux Technology Center (LTC).
- This site is for and by members of the Linux community, and is hosted and supported by Brian Warner: Linux user, fan, and member of IBM's Linux strategy team.
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