Extensive Coverage of Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006

cdlu writes "LWN and NewsForge both extensively covered the goings-on at this year's OLS. NewsForge: day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. LWN (subscription required for most): article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4." I especially enjoyed the description of reverse engineering a USB device from cdlu's coverage of day 3; one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux! Update: 07/25 04:57 GMT by T : Eric Preston, who delivered that talk on reverse engineering USB devices, kindly linked to both his slides and the accompanying screenshots.

Comments

Excellent whitepapers

[Lost Found]

Almost 1,000 pages of very interesting whitepapers from the event can be found in the first and second PDFs.

Containers

[ovz_kir]

That's a pity that a few talks about containers (OS-level virtualization, a la advanced Jails, a la Solaris Zones/Partitions) were not covered at all. There were (at least) four of them:
- Eric Biederman's talk about namespaces
- Cedric Le Goater's talk about application mobility (a.k.a. live migration of containers)
- A BOF on containers, moderated by Dave Hansen
- A BOF on the resource management (one of the components of containers), moderated by Dipkanar Sarma

There was also a half-an-hour discussion about containers on the Kernel Summit. Let me summarise all these in a few lines:
1. Containers are a real alternative (or a good addition) to Xen and paravirtualization. In most cases they can be used for same applications, without incurring all the Xen's overhead and dirty hacks)
2. Everybody wants containers in the mainstream kernel
3. There are different implementations (IBM's stuff, OpenVZ, Linux-VServer, and Eric's) and their developers need to agree upon them what to submit/push into mainline. This is hard to do, but a required step.
4. Resource management: User Beancounters from OpenVZ is a good (the only?) candidate for inclusion into mainstream.

Hauwei CDMA card+Ubuntu=Out of box.

[dwater]

I recently bought a Huawei CDMA card. It worked 'out of the box' with Ubuntu. The USB version also worked first time.

Of course, we had to figure out the wvdial config file to make it do anything, but that didn't take long.

Re:no, we don't want containers

[ovz_kir]

No, I am not trying to sell something -- OpenVZ is free software (free as in freedom). By the way, OpenVZ developers fixed a lot of bugs in mainstream, so they are rather fixing your kernel than fucking it up. All of the OpenVZ code is #ifdef'd so if no appropriate options are selected the code is not compiled in. Finally, you do not understand what containers are useable for...hmm I can try and give you some examples if you like. Basically, the same isolation/security that you'd rather use VMware for -- the only thing is with containers you do not have to pay performance penalty. Also, containers are hardware-independent, they can be managed "en masse" (unlike VMware VMs), they can be live migrated from box to box. And in case you do not want to run different kernels -- containers are much better/efficient to use than full VMs. Speaking of multiple root users on the box -- each and every HSP sells those cheap VPSs based on one of the existing implementation of containers. They sell it as cheap as $10/month or so -- and the root access is included. So go buy one and try to crack the system. I mean, please do not spread the "it's totally insecure" FUD if you do not have any real experience with that.