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Mosix now GPLed
Az0th writes "Prof. Amnon Barak posted today to the Mosix list
an announcement that the Mosix distribution is now
under GPL. See the story for details. "
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All I can say is WOO HOO! This is great news. I've read about Mosix a little bit, and if it works as well as it was described, this is fantastic news.
And to top it all off, GPL. IMHO, this is the perfect license for this product, since there is so much potential for growth. Imagine a best-of-breed scalable redundant clustering solution. If we're not there with Mosix today (although I've heard some nice stuff about it, for sure) we're bound to be there soon. This is the first big sign I've seen that the tides are turning.
Victory is near, I can smell it.
MOSIX will let you reuse legacy code and distribute it on a processor farm so if you have many jobs of a type to run this will kick your throughput through the roof.
Latency, on the other hand, will stay the same with MOSIX because you're still running a serial piece of code from who-knows-when. If you want a single 24 hour job to finish faster, you still have to use MPI or PVM or (...) to farm it on several machines. But if it's several long-term jobs that you just want running at a good pace,
MOSIX is excellent.
I wouldn't jump to the "greedy bastards" conclusion so readily. After all, it's an educational institution that's developing this thing in the first place. The only greed that universities exhibit is during registration.
It probably took them this long to cut through the red tape. Apparrently, the Israeli military was involved in funding the project, and they most likely wanted assurances it couldn't be used to build The Islam-a-Bomb.
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
If linux had been under a BSD license, they would not have released the sourcecode (at least, in the foreseeable future - it has taken them a few weeks to decide to go GPL). This is a fine example of how the GPL benefits the movement.
I suspect with time it will also be a fine example of how free software will add to the project, since there will no doubt be a high level of interest in its clustering capabilities.
__// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Sorry
They originally tried to release a binary-only module, with GPL'd modifications to the kernel source to 'hook in' that module (yes believe it or not that is a violation of the GPL, there is currently an exception granted by Linus for certain drivers which do not change the driver interface - only his exception clause allows this to be done legally).
However, this was in violation of the GPL and they were not able to release anything, until it was resolved - thankfully by changing the entire license.
__// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
#!/usr/local/bin/perl5
# 'cuz debian ships a cruddy 5.004
use Rant::Soapbox;
my $post = new Rant::Soapbox;
$post->content( <<END );
After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.
MOSIX is a very valuable contribution to free software and quite a few people, raving license lunatics especially, ought to say a silent (or vocal!) "thank you."
More software is a good thing. More free software is a very good thing. Rabid lunatic license paranoia is a bad thing.
END
warn "./ probably ate the last post due to entity translation.\n";
$post->send_without_preview || die "I hate when posting doesn't work.\n";
Programs do not have to be designed for MOSIX to benefit from it.
An obvious example is make. If you tell make to run several compiles in parallel, an SMP or MOSIX cluster will run those compiles on several processors at the same time. You can't do that on a Beowulf cluster without making a Beowulf version of the compiler. (Yes, I am aware that a compiler will want to do a lot of I/O to include files and libraries...)
Yes. It's mentioned in the (limited) documentation. In particular for dealing with varying architectures.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
I wonder how they got around the Israeli government's export restrictions? My understanding was that *this* was the main reason MOSIX wasn't GPLed in the first place.
That and fears that China or some other potentially threatening country would get a hold of it to model nukes (cheap supercomputer). When I talked to Dr. Barak several months ago about porting it from BSD to Linux, he said they were adamant about not releasing it. I told him it would happen one way or another.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
Hmm, not sure if I want to do this...
Picked it up earlier today, before I found out it was news!
A mirror of the source is on http://dougal.chu.cam.ac.uk/mosix/
Some /.'ers seems to think about people or companies in terms of "good" or "bad". Other ./'ers don't think of people or companies that way, instead they think of _behaviours_ as good or bad.
When people or companies like Linus or Microsoft are consistently behaving good or bad, this distinction doesn't cause any problems.
However, as Cowards Anonymous demonstrated, when someone _change_ behaviour, this cause some confusion. For CA, the new "good" behaviour proves that the Mosix people where "good" all along, and therefore think an apology from the people who complained about the previous "bad" behaviour is appropriate. However, no such apology is to be expected, because the new "good" behaviour doesn't affect the status of the old "bad" behaviour.
This is the same problem some people got when Troll Tech changed to an Open Source(TM) complaint license.
To be honest, I think the tendency to divide people (and companies) into good or bad are a sign of immaturity. A world-view created by Hollywood. Companies in a market economy just tries to make money, and people tend to do what they believe are right. Judge behaviours instead.
It's a different thing. MOSIX is effectively SMP over a network (yes I know it's not exactly the same, but hey.) whereas Beowulf is a message-passing system. The idea of Beowulf is to allow a single dataset to be worked on by processes running on several different machines, and applications have to be specially written. The upshot is, one application running fast.
The idea of MOSIX is that you have one big kernel distributed over a lot of boxes (rather than SMP, which is just distributed over a lot of CPUs in one box). So a single thread can still only run on one CPU. But if you have lots of processes you want to run on one machine, or a heavily multithreaded process, then MOSIX is ideal.
Of course, for lots of things you don't need either of these systems. If you can divide your data set up at the start of the task then 1/nth of the set can be processed on each single-processor machine. This is more or less how things like distributed.net work, with no need for MOSIX or Beowulf or PVM or any special system.
axolotl
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Just to inform you, they're still looking for sponsors for maintenance and further development (eg. network RAM). Hm, the great Linux distributions tend to spend money on stuff like that - would certainly be a good idea ....
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Parallel-Processi ng-HOWTO.html
It goes trough a lot of the issues involved, hardware, suitable tasks and existing solutions.
just the archive, no docs or anything
If you are considering building a cluster, I would highly recommend you check out MOSIX. I've used it in the past, and it works very well. The ability to migrate a running process from one box to another is just cool ;) I'm glad to see it's available once again and I can finally upgrade my kernel and still have MOSIX support.
I am pretty much a Linux newbie, but from what i understand, a piece of software must be specifically written (or patched) in order to work effectively with Beowulf. Mosix seems to allow any process (regardless of how it was written) to effectively use the distributed resources of the system. IMO, this would make a MOSIX cluster easier to work with (from a coding standpoint). Is this correct, or am I reading things wrong?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
What is Mosix, you ask? From their web page:
MOSIX is a software tool for supporting cluster computing. The core of MOSIX are
kernel-level, adaptive load-balancing and memory ushering algorithms that are geared
for maximal performance, overhead-free scalability and ease-of-use of a scalable
computing cluster. These algorithms are designed to respond to variations in the
resource usage among the nodes by migrating processes from one node to another,
preemptively and transparently. MOSIX provides some SMP/NUMA functionalities in
order to allow a cluster of PCs (workstations and servers) to work cooperatively as if
part of a single system.