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openMosix Is Shutting Down
jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."
If they were the best of the best of the best they would not be shutting down.... The best of the best find a way, and when they're done they go home and show the prom queen the difference between ROM and RAM!!
Hope is the currency of fools
someone else will pick it up.
Isn't that kind of the point of open source?
I read about that yesterday. I had a lot of good times with it. I thought it was fun to create ad-hoc Beowulf clusters afterhours in the computer labs at the school I used to work at with clusterknoppix. The Mosix website had a valid point about multi-core CPUs and VMs. OpenMosix... RIP
The game.
There's a similar project named 'Open Single System Image'
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssic-linux
I for one welcome our new non-OpenMosix overlords.
FTA: "Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008."
Wikipedia: Moshe is founder of the company behind the Xen software, XenSource, Inc. Moshe is also founder of the company Qumranet which is behind the development of the KVM virtualization technology in the Linux kernel.
Looks like Moshe is to busy for that old fashioned mosix stuff...
Apparently the code doesn't count, only spurious logic about changing hardware factors. Oh, and apparently the sun does, in fact, set.
But how cool a name is Moshe Bar?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein
From the summary it seems that the people who've contributed most to the openMosix code have moved on to other things.
Well, that happens. People's lives don't stand still, they change: they take on other commitments at work, have relationships, travel the world, etc.
But that doesn't mean that openMosix is dead.
On the contrary. This is open source software.
The code isn't lost. Others can pick up the slack and join the effort as they see fit. openMosix can still move forward, perhaps not at the same pace as before, but forward nevertheless.
It seems to me that the summary misses the point of OSS. If this was a closed source project and the lead developers had walked away then, yes, openMosix would almost certainly be dead and buried.
But, unless I'm missing something huge this isn't the end of the line for openMosix, precisely because it is open source.
It hardly seems appropriate to look at this as a failing of OSS development. On the contrary, it's arguably an example of one of its strengths.
This a baton change not a retirement. At best, the new holder(s) of the baton will soon hit the same stride as the previous holder(s). At worst, the baton has fallen to the ground and it simply needs to be picked up.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
There are many very valuable projects that get very little funding - insufficient to pay the programmers who give that value. If the contributors cannot live by their work then they have to go find payment elsewhere.
As open source matures, people will come to understand that taking without giving back is not a sustainable model.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Unfortunately not everyone is as optimistic about it as you, but I hope that they're wrong ;)
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?_
Yeah, but how likely or realistic is it that the few people in the world who understand, in this case, clustering, to such an extent, will choose to work on this project? The vast majority of software developers want to get paid for their work.
In theory, you're right. It'll continue. But will reality live up to theory? Only time will tell.
I don't respond to AC's.
From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any.
LOL what?! The poster must be on crack. OpenMosix/Mosix is nothing but an experimental/buggy piece of software used by hobby clusterers, it works with 2.4 kernels but never had good support on 2.6. Real cluster software consists of PBS/Maui or some other queueing/scheduler built in house.
What a ghastly overreaction, but hey, this is slashdot.
Best of the best? I may get flamed for this, but I'd barely heard of OpenMosix.
When Apache, the Linux kernel, Eclipse and (name a popular GNU project) look like "shutting down", then maybe we can bleat about the failure of open source.
And as some have said, there's not real reason the baton can't be passed on to interested new parties.
I agree, there's a degree of optimism in my argument but the summary is plain flawed.
Its message and tone is that openMosix = dead, openMosix = OSS, therefore openMosix dying = OSS solutions are bad.
What it completely fails to address is that the situation would be no better, and in fact would be a lot worse, if this was a CSS tool. Indeed, the ray of light for openMosix users comes from the fact that it is OSS.
Bashing OSS solutions because one is dead/dying/in limbo/whichever way you want to look at it is patently ridiculous because it's not the openness of the code that's at fault here, or even the open source development model.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The pendulum has swung back now. In the days when 10Mbps ethernet came onto the scene and our processors could barely keep up with their floopy drives (which is why a floppy used DMA), we collectively came up with the idea of using several computers to solve a problem by splitting the problem up among them. Since then thanks to Moore's law our processors now spend a lot of time waiting to fetch the next instruction from their on-chip L1 cache - as in when there's a miscalculation in the branch prediction step.
Our networks however have not kept up to this pace. Right now our very best effort for network speed is infiniband which tops out at 96Gbps theoretical limit. The AMD Opteron page lists a limit of 24GBps, that's 192Gbps, bandwidth using three coherent hypertranport processors. See the problem?
I see one of two things happening, either we'll find a magic bullet technology to significantly increase our network speeds; or some limit will finally end Moore's law. Otherwise there's simply no reason to tie together multiple processors. Despite Windows best efforts, our CPU's still spend most of their time waiting for something to do.
Dennis Dumont
Even the license isn't clear. It seems to be GPL, but CVS commits have lots of comments like OpenMosix is no longer free software. What does that mean? I recall their was an ownership rift 5 years ago. I wonder if they ever got OpenMosix running without the non-GPL code.
(my slashdot human verification image was "abandons" - how fitting)
an openMosix cluster of these
"""
The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.
"""
Translation: The developers have found new shiny objects to play with and are going to drop this to play with something new.
Remember that OSS is mostly about developers scratching an itch. Once that itch is scratched, if a new shiny object is put in-front of a developer, chances are they'll drop what they're doing to pursue the new thing. As seems to be the case here.
i.e. New is fun, maintenance is boring, boring sucks, do something new.
look at sourceforge much?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Wrong.
.NET and get experience with that environment, as now that MS has declared foxpro dead, they aren't ever expecting to get another foxpro job. The only alternative left to companies with "legacy" foxpro code is to completely re-write any application in that language in a different one (not a small task).
MS regularly end of lifes things. Just recently the EOL'd foxpro. Sure its a crap language and a crap environment, but I know 5 people personally who are frantically trying to teach themselves
You can still get the openMosix code, if you had openMosix experts you could still fix things and move forward. If you have an existing system on openMosix you can look for a different solution and move to it or keep your system on the existing code. I really don't see how this is any different than MS calling for an EOL of Windows NT. When they do that you are forced to invest tons of hours and money buying new systems, developing a migration plan, deploying the new system, training users on it... It is no different in Open source or closed source, when vendors decide they aren't supporting you anymore, it costs you money.
Vendors regularly leave users out in the cold, both closed source and open. Only difference is, if a company wanted to pick up openMosix they certainly could. They could provide support, ongoing development, whatever. When MS EOLs something, your only choice is to take whatever MS gives you.
I could maintain it. I have 7 to 10 coworkers who could maintain it. At my previous place there was one guy who could have maintained it. At the place before that, there were over a dozen people who could have maintained it.
.net/c# guy you know. Most people who could maintain Mosix would not tolerate such work. They'd look down on it like a typical C++ developer looks down on HTML or Visual Basic development.
I would in fact maintain it if I cared. I don't care.
BTW, I have doubts about the
Yes and no. CSS at this scale always means commercial. One thing about commercial software is that popular, well used competitive software will not disappear because people got bored and moved onto other things. When the development of a piece of software provides a revenue stream, it is not going anywhere. People will be hired, an interested competitor will buy it out in order to give themselves a leg up, whatever. There are all sorts of survival mechanisms available to commercial software that doesn't exist for OSS. Sure, there is lots of abandoned CSS out there, and it is sad that the code is not available to the few faithful that would want it. However, CSS that is as large in its speciality as this seems to be doesn't. It might fade if something better comes along, but it won't just disappear when things are going good.
Times like this make me realize that the end result of capitalistic software and open source software is really naught if you are on the losing end. If nobody likes your work, you are not going to be funded, and that's really what seems to be happening here.
The premise for shutting down the project is correct. Multiple cores all but eliminate the need for the most extreme clusters. Throw PCI-X graphics cards into the mix, and you have even that much more computing power. That's not to say that there aren't applications that require clustering, but, those who make those applications probably are going to wind up writing their own distributed processing framework anyway that is tailored to their needs.
Sometimes the turtles are just destined to be soup.
This is my sig.
Was a switch to 2.6. I personally was using it in 2.4, however, when 2.6 rolled out, OpenMosix wasn't going to support it for some time. This caused a lot of users to stop using it, because for NOW, there wasn't really a way to justify staying on 2.4, when the responsiveness of 2.6 was so much better.
I see now that they have an alpha version out for 2.6.
Note that 2.6.0 was released in 2003.
And if this work is important, the community of users will organize and hire software developers to work on it. Thanks to the fact that it is Free Sotfware, the user comminity can do this.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
NO WAY is FUNNY. ;) What are you looking at me for?
The article summary was certainly an eye grabber... but, the truth is, I've deployed quite a few linux HA and load balancing clusters. I have also installed a couple openMosix clusters. While it may be sad that openMosix is closing, the vast majority of clustering cannot be handled by openMosix. It is designed as a parallel processing cluster. I would say 99% of clusters are of the HA/load balancing variety. IE, I've got 3 web servers and I want to distribute the load between them. openMosix cannot do this, it isn't designed for it. Or I have 5 DB servers and I want to distribute load/perform replication. again openMosix does not do this. It is a "processing" cluster. IE I have this huge data set, and an application which will split up that data set and do some processing on it. Think SETI@home except, you don't want to send it to people's homes, you just want to run a single process which will send jobs off to other nodes for computing. The only thing I ever successfully used openMosix for was a compile cluster, and for that it was nice, but even for regularly compiling KDE, it wasn't much worth the effort to get the cluster running for the time it saved in compiling.
At the time I used it it couldn't migrate web server processes or db server processes, so it was useless for what I do most of the time.
On the contrary. A CSS product could be rebadged as openMosix 2008 Horizons(R), given some fancy UI tools and sold for more than double to a bunch of mums and dads who believe they need a cluster of 4 new core duo PCs to run a web browsing platform which fully enables their personal web experience for tomorrow today.
It's soooo much easier to make money from closed source software.
I don't therefore I'm not.
If they hadn't gotten to .NET by now, those Foxpro devs wouldn't have been able to fix Foxpro anyway and they're certainly not going spend their own money to pay somebody to maintain it. So what's your point?
As usual, people are posting replies without any clue about the actual situation (or at least the claims of important people involved)
See http://mulix.livejournal.com/199931.html
"Now the real project can get the credit it deserves. I hate it when people steal credit. It was so annoying to read interviews where it was claimed that behind openMosix are years of research, when all this research was actually behind MOSIX."
and they lack the means or motivation to continue
See what happens when you *stop* imagining a Beowulf Cluster?
Table-ized A.I.
1. a painful migration, and i mean painful in terms of giving birth or passing a kidney stone
2. maintain the code yourself, which could be even MORE painful and costly.
yes i know everyone will jump up and down about how this could happen to any project, but folks lets face facts here - In OSS projects where no one is getting paid to write code, you could possibly be hinging a key part of your opperation on the hope that a bunch of geeks don't tire of their little project.
And the "but you can maintain the code yourself" argument is a loser - it's often far more expensive to code yourself then to just pay MS and friends for a solution.
obviously this doesn't apply to huge projects like apache or mysql who have corperate funding.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Some utility bits of open source of course do not need a lot of maintaining and reach full maturity pretty early and only require the odd tweak for hardware compatibility, for those projects maintaining a team is difficult, logically speaking those projects get pick up and carried by another open source project that can run them as a side line.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
yep, like how they EOL'd win98 last year after 9 years of support, and foxpro after 10+ years.
yeah their real bastards MS, only giving a product a 9 year life span. Those linux projects they just never EOL... oh wait no they don't they kill versions off after 2 years or less!
Face it. people have known the writing was on the wall for foxpro for atleast 3 years. they've had shitloads of time to learn .net. it's thier problem, not MS's
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Guys who used to develop BProc now are focusing their efforts on http://xcpu.org/
Look at their versions. The latest release is 2.4.26-based, with a 2.6.15 beta. Clearly it's an invasive patchset, which must be difficult to maintain. Back when the project started, this was probably a worthwhile effort, but the HPC world has changed.
My guess is that the advent of commodity NUMA hardware (Opteron) motivated more development of MPI applications and libraries, since HPC workloads often perform better on NUMA hardware using MPI between the NUMA nodes. If all your applications are MPI-aware, there's a lot less motivation to use an SSI solution that's a couple years behind on hardware support and a pain to maintain.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
What part of "It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty." do wary business users not understand then? It's all up front. Not all open source projects are created equal, for sure, and many have a great deal of commercial support. To say businesses should be wary of relying the unpaid work of complete strangers with no contractual support is a big DUH isn't it? That goes for ANYTHING. That's why the Red Hats and Novells of the world exist.
Geezuus, it's not like OpenMOSIX is unusable as is, or that there aren't alternatives. For that matter, while coding one's own cluster controller isn't trivial, it isn't string theory either. Our shop has released (eg. given away) two schedulers, and we've got another that's stayed in house. When I've strolled the booths at the SuperComputing conference, it seems that every other university is giving away their own cluster controller.
OpenMOSIX is neat, but it ain't the end all be all, and it's been my experience that any shop that's serious about running a cluster manages to find/attract someone with the chops to get it up and running. Can just any elementary school pull one together for "free"? Maybe not. For them, there's Pooch or AppleSeed.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I've used a 64 node Beowulf cluster on occasion. The queue was generally full of single-node jobs and multi-node jobs hardly ever ran. There really is no good way of scheduling in this environment without the ability to suspend a job on one node and later resume it on another. So far as I know, our scheduling software was not capable of this. (Fortunately, I was just submitting single node jobs.)
Starting with the information in the summary, I spent a few minutes web searching. "bproc" appears not to be capable of this: it just means that your primary node can "see" the processes running on other nodes, so you can use 'ps', 'kill' etc. on them. However OpenSSI has "process migration". Is this the ability to move processes from one node to another?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How to obtain that very hard to obtain OS:
http://www.mosix.org/txt_grid.html
http://www.mosix.com.au/prices.html
Caveat Utilitor
Basically what we (the community) has figured out is that SSI featuresets should not be implemeneted in the OS layer, but below it. Look at the SGI Altix technology. Or large Unisys machines. Or that hyper-transport happy monstrosity that Cray is building. They have special low-level firmwares running on the I/O processors that are doing in low latency, tuned hardware what *Mosix was trying to do from Ring 0 on the nodes.
Using various ISA interfaces (MPI in the low end, or Hypervisor abstractions like Xen, etc. etc.) you can run many guest OSs in the space as needs require, and localize the shared-memory-ness as required to get maximum threading benefit with the lowest total latency you can tolerate. All this with minimally modified guest OSs in which to run the code. This is a much better situation then heavily modified kernels pretending to be a single system image (and then having to worry about forking/threading/VFS issues and propogation of that stuff).
On the flip side, grid technology and speciality message-passing libraries fill out the feature set for more embarassingly parallel problems that need lots of CPU and RAM... you have the luxury of spending time and money coding your applications for that environment if you are CPU limited.
Mosix doesn't have much use anymore as a general purpose product. Either it's too heavy-weight (and drowning in syncro overhead) and we should be relying on firmware/hypervisors that are customized for the hardware, or it's not necessary because we can handle the load balancing at a higher level.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... The developers have found a new, exciting and more importantly PAID job.
You can congratulate them for their career move at their workplace, the local MacDonalds. You won't get fries for free but nothing beats asking for a Beowulf Cluster of fries.
Most Beowulf clusters run parallel codes written to use the Message_Passing_Interface (MPI). MPI programs really don't want to be migrated to different nodes while they're running, so load management is achived through schedulers such as Grid Engine, TORQUE, and others. These schedulers avoid the need for process migration by preallocating the resources (compute nodes) in advance, and prevent the load imbalance from happening in the first place. openMosix waits for the imbalance to slow down the computation before it migrates a process to relieve the problem.
If you check the archives of the Beowulf mailing list, you'll see that while the Beowulf community knows about openMosix, very few Beowulfers use it.
Video processing is not done through multi-processing with shared memory. It's done in batch, in a grid-type environment.
Weather prediction almost certainly uses special-purpose math libraries (ScaLAPACK, etc.) in a MIMD environment.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Let me explain the reason for their decision in a sane way as I see it.
*MOSIX was supposed to provide an EASY way of doing clustered worth. Low over head in terms of coding and administration. It was aimed at MODERATE clusters not massive beasts as it lacked performance/efficiency. While two extra machines may be worth the lower overhead two hundred probably are not so the immense clusters used other methods.
Advanced in computing, multiple cores and so on, have killed this low-to-medium cluster market NOT clustering as a whole.
Yes there are tons of things that still need clustering, think web data for example for a new one, but they are large and even larger. They need performance and so *MOSIX is not what they are looking for.
In other words the market for *MOSIX is effectively dead thus the project is joining it.
Am I the only one who noticed that Moshe Bar (the leader of the openMosix project) has gone on to found three (!) virtualization companies, including Xensource? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe_Bar It seems his professional interests have moved on as of quite some time ago, and that this is merely "catching up."
:D
I've looked into attempting an OpenMosix cluster before in my free time but the lack of a 2.6 version made it hard for me to justify the time - as all the work I do from day to day is on a 2.6 system, so I couldn't really gain anything from it. The project has seemed "dormant" for a while. Perhaps this announcement will spur someone on the sidelines to speak up and take the reins, and make openMosix a viable solution for modern (software) systems again: I have a whole pile of spare computers just itching to be run at the same time
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
You are actually making the opposite point from what you intended. Most families have multiple desktops and notebooks and could realistically benefit from pooling hardware for realtime home video editing, gaming, distributed backups or math/physics educational software. Yet, it takes geeks who only use OSS to actually set up clustering.
As for money part, we are talking about project abandoned by original developers. With proper legal support though, OSS would be easier to profit from than CSS as other people would create derivative works and pay you royalties.
You start the project in the first place because you have a unique solution to a given real-world problem.
... but that would never have been apparent if it wasnt tried.
.. but at da club, its not working out that way. Thankfully, we can toss the lime green shirt and try something different, because we are non-commercial.
.. are looking at the story with their commerically-oriented-hat on. If that is you, then you shouldnt be working in science or computers - you should be out selling mobile phone ringtones, Celine Dion records, yo-yo's, insurance, timeshare condo plans, roller skates, lottery tickets, etc, etc, etc. If that is you, then you deserve to end up with the fat'n'ugly chick in the lime green shirt, simply because the advertising banners plastered all over the wall TOLD you she was the best choice.
Others may have different solutions to the same problem, and you are all free to attack it in your own way. In a totally free environment, you can determine the best solution to the problem using proof-by-mindshare.
As time moves on, the landscape changes, and some/none/all of your assumptions about the problem domain that drive your solution get challenged.
If it appears that your solution is no longer relevant, and that other methods work better in the real world, then your project can successfully conclude, and you can move on to the next big thing. In this case, OpenMosix can see that it's solution to the problem is not the ideal way to go, as evidenced by the fact that MPI, load balancers, (insert other solutions), tend to be more applicable to most real world problems
In a way, an open source software development is a test of a hypothesis. You dont measure success just by proving the hypothesis - you can also disprove it (or spawn a new one), and still claim success.
If this had been a commercial / proprietry project, then everything would be different - there would be egos and money on the line, so the motivations for doing the project in the first place are very very different. If OpenMosix was commercial, higher ups in the company would be moving the goalposts to suit themselves, spending money on advertising and kickbacks, and putting effort into forcing it into sitations where it wasnt the ideal answer. The resultant mindshare and marketshare in a commercially driven enviroment yields sub-optimal solutions - its based on which solution has the best political backing and advertising budget, not the one that best fits the problem.
See, its like this - to an opensource mindset, the hottest person in da club is the one that gets _given_ the most phone numbers. To a non-opensource mindset, the hottest person in da club is the one who can _buy_ the most phone numbers. Someone thought that the flouro lime green shirt might be a good idea
The sort of people who read the headline of the story and see it as a bad thing, a negative thing, an anti-FLOSS thing
Thank goodness open source allows a project to go from conception to conclusion for all the right reasons.
So here's a personal anecdote: Microsoft, Inc. held a free training session/love-in for devs and wannabee devs at a vacated movie theater in Bellevue, WA. It was ~2003 and I was one of the wannbee-devs-in training in the audience. Bellevue is maybe five miles from the "promised land" of Microsoft's RedWest campus and One Microsoft Way and MSFT managers were supervising the proceedings. I recall some discussion of extending Office 2003, some interesting demos of Visual Studio, and a lovely parting gift of an Intel webcam, which I still have. (thanks, guys!)
An older grizzled bearded guy stands up during one of the Q&A's, his voice tinged with injury: "...but what plans do you have for FoxPro?! Some of us spent a lot of time building these skills." Answer from a Microsoft PM presenting in front of his colleagues and managers: ~"I don't think there are specific plans, and it's very unclear whether that product will be developed further." Followup: "[insert whining here]". Answer to the followup: ~"I've tried to give you a pretty honest answer about where VFP is going, and my suggestion would be to look at growing your skills with .NET if you're interested in developing for MSFT platforms."
I'm not sure how much clearer it gets than that. The writing has been on the wall for VFP for years and years now, and you would have to be borderline negligent as a dev not to realize that. A benefit of playing with proprietary frameworks is that the corporations that own them tend to be pretty up-front about their future. Around 2002 I was learning faux-OO VBScript/ASP (lol), but I quickly recognized that path was a dead end. Developers cannot afford to fall asleep at the switch. Anyone who was surprised by the death of ASP or FoxPro wasn't at all serious to begin with.
any enterprises relying on openMosix to run their operations are in a pretty bad spot right now, i agree. their enterprise quality support has evaporated.
of course, this would be a completely different story if it were a close-source program they were relying on... because... ?
companies go out of business, too. and when their close-source programs are no longer supported, *no one* has the ability to pick up where they left off.
... had clustering for ~15 years (Note that VMS is ~10 years younger then Unix.). And it actually works.
Martin.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
Probably they do. How much of the original development team do you think is still left for things like Windows NT(/Vista), Office, Solaris, NeXTSTEP(/OSX), etc ?
OSS projects tend to "die" when they aren't popular or "interesting" anymore - and the OSS world can be fickle. CSS projects, tend only to die when they aren't *profitable* any more.
It's a hell of a lot easier to hire more programmers for your niche-but-highly-profitable CSS product than it is to get OSS programmers working on a codebase that is no longer popular or "interesting".
Numerous? i seriously doubt it's "Numerous". name me 10 or more seperate projects canned when purchased by a competing software firm. i can think of maybe 5 off the top of my head in the last 10 years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Just follow the links you've just posted and you will realize the OP was right.
... why is OpenMOSIX not releasing their source?
+++ATH0
but if this is useful and actually used by any companies, then it's a great way of getting yourself a job offer to carry on.
... so it might as well be me:
"openMosix is dying and Netcraft confirms it!"
Forgive me.. just trying to keep the memes alive m'am!
Yes... but will it stop running Linux?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Suprisingly enough, there is no discussion about such an announcement on the project mailing list:
m _name=openmosix-devel
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?foru
Sounds like not every one on this project agree with this decision...
Not at all - I just got MOSIX from http://www.mosix.com.au/ and I am not a student. It works very well.
Sorry my English (I am german). What I wanted to say was "hat seit" which (in German) means that a specific attribute has been attained somewhere in the past and continues to the present.
Martin
when MS do not supply the solution?
That's what he meant you retard.
And, I would guess (just a wild stab in the dark, which is what you'll be getting if you don't shut your yap) that you don't USE openMOSIX so in what conceivable way is this a problem for you? None. You just want to fart off about how OSS is bad and MS is good.
Twat.
(ps there isn't a -1 troll-fire mod so feel free to mod down if you don't want this response to be read).
Having read the comments I think people didn't actually read had been put on the announcement page, mostly about SSI losing some of its value in the wake of faster and bigger machines.
To proclaim this is an object of example for the failure of OSS projects - my god, what a leap of stupidity that is. In reality, i'd be claiming the exact opposite in that it was one of the few SSI's to get into real world situations and be used quite heavily - which means it was actually very successful. It's a project that made it through a complete life cycle, birth, success and death. I would say its probably dying slightly before its time, but the authors reasons are quite sound in reality.
This is something you just don't often see in the CSS world - companies make something and want/need to make money off it (indefinitely if possible), so not only do they bring a new version with more bells and whistles every year (even when the prior version only had 10% of its bells and whistles used) they're continuously pushing to continue making money off the product, and that often means "never expire the product, morph it if we must, but every coder hour is less profit - sales are dropping, NEW VERSION TIME!". Wow, that was even less cynical than I normally am!
It's true, EOL warnings are given years in advance. Any evidence to the contrary is of course welcome, but I don't think you'll find any.
throw new NoSignatureException();
but they EOL too. You can't have it both ways.
Optimus Prime: RMS must be stopped... No matter the cost
That's interesting. It doesn't seem to be very common that a founder of one project/company also founds another that competes in the same space.
I guess we really will have to start imagining a beowulf cluster of those!
Yeah, damn him for not giving us all his time and effort for free!
Bit note that likewise, this story is a warning that openmosix will be halting in 2008, not an immediate pulling the rug from under you.
I am trolling
We really are going to have to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
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Karma: Chameleon
Since it's open source, anyone is free to pick up where they left off. It's not like the world of proprietary software where the company disappears along with it's software leaving users with *no* options whatsoever.
I expect an even better openMosix will emerge sometime down the road.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
they dont compete, they are almost opposing...
one tried to run one heavy process in several machines
the other tried to run several light process, inside a container (virtual machine), all in a single physical machine
of course, now you can join the two:
run several process inside a virtual machine, in multiple physical machines
openmosix could do that, but you would always be dependent of the node that started the machine, so no real failover, only more speed...
so its better to find a way to migrate not only the load but all the process, so you can gain also a failover
Higuita
It's not just about "shrink wrapped" products. For example, I used to work in industry. writing internal code for analyzing mass-spec protein data. Now that company has been purchased by another and that code has been lost forever. If the code was open source, it could have lived on and helped people working on similar problems. This sort of thing goes on in *every* merger and acquisition -- thousands of them each year.
Indeed, the demise of an open source product leaves more options available to its customers than the similar demise of a closed-source product. The safest closed-source bet these days is Microsoft, but that brings a unique set of issues as well. It's always the noobs that think they can make a enterprise-level decision that is so good that they will never need an exit strategy. History is filled with examples of people who surely wished they had kept a few options open. With open source, you always have a choice.
I had hoped openmosix would've made it to a stable 2.6 kernel.
I ran/run dynebolic 1.4.1 and hoped one day it would include clustering again(It hasn't since 1.4.1)
Hopefully someone who can code will pick up the ball and run with it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I remember trying to get the original project guys to use FBSD instead of linux with the idea that the core FBSD team would end up adding the code to the main branch and more people would work on it.
Sorry to see em shutting down, this was a seriously cool project.
By that time, though, I'd already come to be uncomfortable with OpenMosix for two reasons:
- The develpers seemed to be completely uninterested in security issues. This is something that was less of a concern in The Good Old Days, but really should be on the frontest of burners now.
- The OpenMosix kernel code was so large and stuck its tentacles into so many places, there was no way it was ever going to make it into the mainstream kernel. This meant that, if any changes were necessary, we were either at the mercy of the OpenMosix developers or we were going to have to maintain them ourselves.
All of that being said, I loved OpenMosix when it worked. It's a great idea. I came out of a VAX/VMS cluster background, and OpenMosix was a serious step in the direction of resurrecting that functionality in open source. I'd like to see someone take over OpenMosix, make security a priority, and work to break it into small, digestible lumps that could slowly be merged into the mainline kernel.And as someone who recently went through complete hell trying to get a VFP app working properly in a networked environment for a client, all I can really say is that VFP deserved to die. I'm not sure I consider it any better than an Access database strung together with VBScript in this day and age.
There's more going on here I think. Virtual Iron tried to ripp off the technology. I don't know about any of you but when I went to linux expo and saw the virtual iron booth I said.. look, it's open mosix rebranded. I dug further. They do use open mosix.
and some of thier own stuff. But still they sell it as their own and it's not entirely.
OpenMosix should be forked over. I'm sure it will evolve into something bigger if others take it over and host it on sourceforge.
Supercomputing uses a combination of multicore processors, inifiniband, and multiple systems. I don't know why the mosix people bailed. Maybe something new is emerging soon.
i wonder how much OSS will be abandon once the founders get what they wanted
it's always about the money with some people
Have a VB versus C++ or whatever rant in the middle. MODERATION PLS!
*sigh* Time to stop suggesting a homogeneous hardware environment with LTSP + Openmosix. Now I need to suggest $8000 servers that don't scale easily (like openmosix can by trading desktops for compute nodes).
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This sounds like an interesting thing to try with Plan 9 From Bell Labs. It's supposed to be extremely machine-independent (goes all the way with the "everything is a file" concept) and could probably be extended (if it doesn't do so already) to do clustering and virtualising (at the same time!).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
What choice? Lock yourself in even further to the bad decision to stick with Lunix? Get your company hopelessly addicted to a legion of FOSSie programmers with questionable skills?
No thanks. I'd never have my company use a solution which doesn't have a company providing support, and people to sue if their negligence causes us damages. You can't sue "teh Lunix" or the 350 lb high school kids who wrote the software your company is now dependent upon.
If you want to be a professional, you have to make decisions like a professional. Welcome to the grown-up world, where you have to make decisions about important things based upon realistic factors. Lunix and FOSS is for little kids who don't have data worth millions of dollars, and the future of a corporation riding on their decision making.
Almost every company I've worked with or for has had some sort of relationship with Microsoft, and there hasn't been a single time that relationship has been a bad one. MS bends over backwards to keep their customers happy. Can the same be said of some tiny little FOSS "company" where the President, CEO, salesman, and programmer are all the same person? Or maybe we should go with a company like IBM, which uses FOSSies and foreign contractors as unskilled slave labor.
No thanks. I'd rather stick with a reliable US corporation which cares about their customers, like Microsoft. Lunix and FOSS are for angst-riddled high school kids who aren't living in the real world, and have no idea how things REALLY work.
Your ennui carries no weight in the reality based community.
Gee, thanks; do you have ANY idea how much Dr. Pepper hurts when it shoots out of your nose? "Cares" about their customers, indeed.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
This is like the tenth /b/tard post today, shouldn't you guys be posting Harry Potter spoilers over on Digg?
So you think you are going to sue M$ and they'll simply fall over for your peanut company?
The main reason projects like this are floundering is that the ROCKS project is becoming the defacto standard for cluster setups.
Also, companies like IBM and HP love to push their own proprietary setups.
As well, there are some good commercial products that add lots of well supported tools.
For example MOAB
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The biggest difference is that Microsoft claimed as of six months ago that they were still actively developing FoxPro and that their would be new releases, so lots of people (my employer included) were still maintaining their legacy applications instead of porting them to another system. Guess they changed their mind.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I love Plan 9 from Bell Labs. When I saw that BeOS article a few days ago I thought people should be asking the same question to Plan 9.
Moshe is an Israeli. Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States (see Nation Master). I think it has to do with Jewish genes as you see simillarities in their religion and many other things.
I have a half dozen kids. I actually spend time with them, usually in the morning because of flexible hours at work.
.net/java virtual machine implementation), etc.
.net developer whose life has no meaning.
I do very cool stuff. I won't disclose it, but it involves lots of: hard-core assembly, writing stuff like VMWare, picking apart hex dumps (packets, files, kernel memory, etc.), JIT translation (like doing the
So I'm not getting $130/hour. (minus time spent begging for new contracts) Oh well.
I get to do fun stuff at work (for a hard-core hacker), and I get to enjoy my family.
Why is money so important? It sounds like your priority is not family, but toys. The money buys a needlessly fancy/new car, home, boat, RV, second home, box seat season ticket, jewelry collection, horse, pedigreed dog... so you can look fancy and distract yourself from the misery of being a
Maintaining out-of-tree patches is painful. I was part of a small team doing exactly that, with extremely filthy hacks into the scheduler even. I know of what you speak, from personal experience. Dealing with old kernels is icky too.
That all comes under desire though, not ability. ("desire" as in "I'd like to do this", not "I'd like somebody else to do this")
I've known quite a few people with the ability. I expect that any of them, including myself, would actually maintain Mosix if either:
a. we had strong personal reasons to want Mosix
b. we got paid decently
For those of us with the ability, all it takes is the desire -- which I'm not seeing. Mosix just isn't worth the trouble.
When that MS Message Queueing thing fucks up, what do you do?
The lower level you go, the fewer bugs are underneath you. When you write the compiler and the OS, only the hardware itself can cause you pain.
BTW, writing a messaging system can be mildly fun. Today I wrote malloc() again. Not your kind of fun?
With CSS your provider plays the tune and you dance.
With FOSS you play the tune, if you want to, and you may decide to dance, or not. In other words you are in command of your IT infrastructure, but many people and businesses are afraid to take responsibilities for their own technological future.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
see http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You can be left in the same situation with a products based on closed source.
The fundamental difference is that with the open solution you have got a fighting chance to keep things going if you really need to.
With closed source you may be completely and utterly in your own with no access to the code and with no rights whatsoever to obtain it.
I utterly fail to see how I would be worst off with a dying FOSS project rather than with a CSS one.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When any company mandates to you (their client, for bunnies sakes!) to upgrade, you upgrade. Period. They play the tune and you dance it or get stuffed.
With FOSS you call all the shots, if a project dies you have options and you dictate the timmings for migration if necessary.
Why is that so many people out there are afraid to be owners of their own computing infrastructure?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.