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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
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...
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.
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.
OpenSSI was part of one-stop solutions, if I remember correctly, the doomed Compaq foray into clustering before HP took them over. Doomed? Well, HP has not exactly been Linux-friendly. Their efforts to be more so by hiring Bruce Perens never panned out and you certainly don't see them porting any of their HPUX security to Linux.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The big thing I'd add is that all of the high performance clusters I've seen don't use Mosix (open or otherwise). The reason is that while mosix makes some administration tasks easier, it doesn't address the single most important thing for a HPC cluster: Performance.
The point of mosix is to avoid using a library (such as an MPI implementation) to handle parallel apps, and to make managing a cluster 'easier'.
The problem is that the performance just isn't there, and that the 'industry' as a whole has overall chosen to use MPI to handle parallelism, and use various other methods to manage the cluster.
Bottom line: The industry they targeted didn't move in the direction mosix was headed (which is exactly why the developers are shutting it down).
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I do highly parallel processing. The industry as a whole has moved in a different direction (which is, oddly enough one of the reasons the project is shutting down). We use MPI, which is one of the things that mosix was supposed to let you avoid. There are other ways to maintain a system than the "single system image." Mosix had problems with performance, which is an effective way to ensure it won't be used in high performance applications.
And it's no fun to develop something you know isn't going to be used, as the supercomputing 'industry' isn't moving in the same direction that Mosix was heading.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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".
Just follow the links you've just posted and you will realize the OP was right.
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.