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OpenMosix
Francesco Taurino writes "Moshe Bar has released a new Mosix system: openMosix.
From the site:
"For thousands of users Mosix has been a reliable, fast and cost efficient clustering platform. There are hundreds of Mosix installations in life sciences, finance, industry, high tech, research and government environments. The goal of openMosix is to give to these users a continued support and an up-to-date platform. openMosix is initially fully compatible with the last Mosix (1.5.2 for 2.4.13) kernel, but is now growing in its own direction.
If you would like to contribute to the openMosix project, drop a line to moshe@openmosix.org.""
OpenVMS has the most robust, and fastest clustering ability I have ever seen . I just cant wait until linux can do this.
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I just finished implementing my 6 node MOSIX cluster, and I ran across several bugs, and I couldn't find any place to report them. The MOSIX development list is closed subscription, and apparently the good Professor ignores his email.
I'm not clear about some things though... How is MOSIX currently licensed? Why are they being so closed about development?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Follow the link: About openMosix
After a difference of opinions on the commercial future of Mosix, I have started a new clustering company - Qlusters, Inc. - and Prof. Barak has decided not to participate for the moment in this venture (although he did seriously consider joining) and held long running negotiations with investors. It appears that Mosix is not any longer supported openly as a GPL project. Because there is a significant user base out there (about 1000 installations world-wide), I have decided to continue the development and support of the Mosix project under a new name, openMosix under the full GPL2 license. Whatever code in openMosix comes from the old Mosix project is Copyright 2002 by Amnon Bark. All the new code is copyright 2002 by Moshe Bar.
I guess I wanna know why there was a fork. I respect both the big Prof and Moshe from what I have read of theirs. Moshe says that Mosix is going in other directions, which sounds kinda...vague ;)
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I know it would break user land tools that were written with bad assumptions - that's why they should fixed. top, for example, would require all of a 50 line patch.
/proc entry) to prevent this stupidity.
It was a very bad decision to ever make a private kernel constant public (like HZ). There should have been a system function for it (or a
There was a thread on the lkml in the summer of 2001 where they discussed getting rid of HZ altogether and keeping the outward appearance of a phony HZ for just such broken userland programs. Why not take that approach?
HZ = 100 in this age of multi-GHz x86 machines is insane.
I had been using mosix for quite a while until recently. The 2.4.13+ext3+mosix release didn't even work properly with all of my hardware, oddly my networking refused to work at all; other kernels had no problems, a kernel built with the same .config worked fine on another box.
:) I do of course, assume that source IP is the biggest stumbling block in migrating network-bound applications.
Anyway, I had noticed that 2.4.13 was sticking around awhile.. meanwhile, the page was being updated.. adding some information about a user-space version and the 'disclaimer' on the download page.
Mosix sounds like a good thing, but in reality it isn't very suitable for many of my common tasks. The biggest problem is the lack of support for programs using shared memory. Apache, Mysql, these do not migrate. Also, programs using Xwindows will not migrate well.. as they are network bound and will migrate back to their home node once they need to report the the Xserver. Basically, don't install mosix on 10 of your home machines and expect any kind of performance increase.. besides, you could probably toss out your dual 1ghz PIII, replace it with a 400mhz celeron and not notice a difference.
It would be nice if there was a transparent pseudo layer for things like X.. where all of the machines have their IP for communicating via mosix.. but all 'outside' communication would be made via mosix though a 'public' ip. That public IP would then be used to connect to the Xserver; hence, apps network bound could migrate easily as they would still have the same IP and (spoofed) Mac address. Basically it would be building a NAT router into Mosix for the idea of being able to migrate network-bound applications. It sounds more complicated then it is, but less complicated then it is to impliment.. and I probably don't make any sense, but I know what I mean
For you Mandrake users, I head a project to include LTSP and Mosix on a Mandrake configured kernel; to package and explain in very easy terms the whole process, and then eventually release a stripped-down Mdk, geared towards education (edu-tech is pretty much my field) ala K12 LTSP. We call it The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project. Check it out and lend a hand if interested. Thanks.
put the what in the where?
We run Mosix, and have had jobs fail. If a node goes down that is running a process two things can (and have) happened. The process dies, or it restarts on another node. What determins this? I have no idea. I can only speak from observation.
It is suggested in the documentation that you have a large swap space on your disk to handle nodes going down. Perhaps with a cached copy of a process it will live on.
In any case, its not scientific but I thought I'd throw that in.