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.""

Comments

This is great... I think

[GigsVT]

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?

Re:Simple question: Why the split?

[VP]

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 never heard of mosix,

[whovian]

and since information is a bit lacking at the link provided, here's a link to the regular mosix FAQ.

Why the fork...

[Raleel]

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 ;)

Re:Why the fork...

[crome]

Well, Prof. Barak did not release any new versions until this morning (after my announcement). He closed off the mailing list and bulletin board. He complained to me repeatedly about the GPL and that he was going to close off Mosix and that Linus is a fool.

In the mosix website they speak about going to user-space, which is probably being done to avoid the GPL.

Just ask yourself, if they had Mosix for 2.4.17 (they released it soon after my openMosix, so it must have been there all along) ready, why didn't Prof. Barak give it to the user-community?

That's what I mean they are going proprietary.

Moshe Bar

Re:Building a mosix cluster

[Hamshrew]

I don't have a link handy, as it's been a few months. I found it to be fairly simple to install... I had 4 PIII machines, set them all up on an internal network and nfs mounted a directory from the head. From there, it was a simple series of steps:

Unpack kernel sources.
Run the Mosix install script.

Did that on each node, then started the mosix service on each.

It worked like a charm for large computations, but had three flaws for normal use.

1) By default, it does not auto-migrate, which was pretty dumb. And getting it to auto-migrate was buried deep in the docs, though it could be guessed from reading up on locks. (echo 1 > /proc/self/lock, I think it was)

2) Migration only occurrs after a certain load average is maintained... if your job involves spawning multiple short-lived processes, like a large compile, it doesn't migrate anyway.

3) Network usage for migration was very heavy over Fast Ethernet.

There you have it. It's the last reason that MOSIX isn't used often in commercial clusters, but it seems well-suited for other distributed computing applications, and has some interesting features, especially for NOW configurations.