Slashdot Mirror
This Year's Ottawa Linux Symposium Covered
cdlu writes "This year's Ottawa Linux Symposium was well-attended and hosted numerous very interesting discussions. There's extensive coverage at NewsForge: (comprehensive day 1,
day 2,
day 3, and
day 4, Linux Weekly News (subscription): A challenge for developers, Linux and trusted computing, and Xen and UML, and O'Reilly network: First day and Wrap up."
... in sunny Wolverhampton, the fleshpot of the UK.
See http://www.lugradio.org/live/2005/ for all the exciting news, blogs and photos.
bah!
I didn't know about the Linux symposium. I would have gone.
The kernel summit is by invitation only
The Kernel Summit is a separate event that occurs the week before the Ottawa Linux Symposium. The Kernel Summit is invitation-only. In contrast, anyone who buys a ticket can attend OLS. Most of the developers (except, notably, Linus) who attend the Kernel Summit also attend OLS. Typically the opening speech at OLS is a summary of what decisions were made at the summit. The summit is where the real near-term hard decisions are hashed out; OLS tends to focus on emerging technologies and has less of an influence over the near-term direction of the core kernel development.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
For those of you interested in attending the next one, or who would just like to get news pertaining to the event please consider joining the mailing list.
o ls-announce/
You can sign up here:
http://lists.linuxsymposium.org/mailman/listinfo/
OLS: Xen and UML
[LWN subscriber-only content]
Friday was virtualization day at the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium; the large room was devoted to that topic all day long. Your editor can only handle so much virtualization at once, and so failed to attend the full set of sessions. Two talks, however, gave a good overview of where a couple of the most important Linux virtualization projects are and what they see in the future.
Xen
A full house turned out to hear Xen hacker Ian Pratt discuss his project. Xen is riding high; the software is cool and getting cooler, the venture money is flowing in, and there is no lack of buzz. Ian's talk, while mostly technical in nature, showed the signs of an up-and-coming business: slick, animated slides, and a good marketing pitch ("virtualization in the enterprise") on why virtualization is a useful thing in the first place. This was worth seeing; it is easy to understand why something like Xen is cool technology, but it can be harder to get a handle on why investors are lining up to throw money at it.
Virtualization is not a particularly new idea. Your editor first experienced it on an IBM mainframe over twenty years ago; we shared files by sending them out our virtual card punch into a co-worker's virtual card reader. Given that the alternative, in that particular time and place, was a real card reader, this looked pretty good. Every now and then things would go weird, and we would have to reboot CMS on our virtual CPU. Not only have things changed little since then, but that was all old stuff even on those days.
In the Linux world, virtualization takes one of three forms. In the "single operating system image mode," as used by the Linux-vserver project (or a simple chroot() setup, for that matter), instances are run within resource containers. Getting strong isolation is hard with this approach. Full virtualization runs an unmodified operating system in a complete virtual machine; systems like VMWare and Qemu work this way. The problem with full virtualization is that it can be hard to do in a way which is both secure and efficient, especially on current x86 hardware. Finally, there is para-virtualization, where the guest operating system kernel is explicitly ported to a virtual machine architecture; both Xen and user-mode Linux are para-virtualized systems.
So why bother with all of this? One is server consolidation: move all of those servers onto fewer actual boxes, with the resulting savings in floor space, power, air conditioning, and hardware maintenance. If you can move virtual machines between physical hosts, you can shift them around to avoid down time; when the disk drive starts to squeal, the administrator can evacuate the virtual systems to working hardware and deal with the problem. Migration also allows workload balancing; it is easier to put more virtual systems on each physical host if they can be shifted around to keep the load on all of those hosts about the same.
One other use for virtualization is security: putting a process within a virtual machine encapsulates it nicely. Even if that process is compromised, there are limits to the damage it can do - as long as it remains trapped within its virtual host. It is also possible to monitor the behavior of the virtual hosts themselves; if one starts doing unusual things, there is a good chance it has been compromised. In this sense, virtualization achieves the same broad goal as SELinux: it puts walls between applications running on the same host. The virtualization approach has the advantage of relative simplicity for situations where all users of a host are to be completely isolated from each other.
Xen, currently, is at version 2.0.6. It provides secure isolation, resource control, quality of service guarantees, live migration of virtual machines, and an execution speed which is "close to native" on the x86 architecture. As a para-virtualization system, Xen requires that the guest kernel be ported to its virtual architecture; ports exist for NetBSD, FreeBSD, Pla
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"Linux is used for 100 percent of the work involved in the development of new processors at Intel, Fisher stated." (http://www.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=05/07/21/07 30239)
;-)
The Macintels are developed on Linux