It’s been a while

A whole lot has happened in the past three months since I last updated my blog. Maybe I’ll get around to keeping it updated with some of the stuff that I’ll be doing for class and COSI. Probably not though, as my track record is turning out to be worse then Donnie’s.

• Took a Software Engineer position with Goodrich in Vergennes Vermont. If you don’t know where Vergennes is, its about 30 minutes south of Burlington.
• Went to Poland to visit one of my friends for two and a half weeks. It was a pretty good time, but unfortunately way to short. Spent most of my time in Warsaw, but I also did spend a couple of days over New Year’s in Zakopane. I’ll be posting pictures eventually but first I’ve got to get a domain name and some web hosting. (That’ll probably get setup during the course of the summer)
• Their are renovations scheduled for the COSI Lab this summer. The biggest highlight is the windows between COSI and the ITL. We’re also getting a machine room for all of our servers that is right in there.
• Helped deploy Fedora on the the lab machines last weekend. Currently it’s running pretty well and was much easier to setup than Ubuntu or Gentoo. We’ll be switching over the build in the ITL at some point in the next week.

Finally some hack time

Finally managed to get in some quality hack time this morning on my CS450 project. Managed to get the build system setup, and I designed and implemented most of the common virtualization interfaces, so if Xen 3 ever manages to stabilize we’ll be able to implement support for that to. We’ve also got a good chunk of our project plan completed. It’s a bit aggresive but we should be able to get everything accomplished.

Also managed to start working on my Tuxmasters in the past couple of days. It looks like I will have to implement a specialized filesystem for Xen overcommit support, the Linux swap support doesn’t look like it will be fast enough. I think I’ve found the code path that I’d like to have the balloon driver replace so the OOM Killer doesn’t actually get executed. It’ll be interesting to see how effective my approach is.

At Least I’m Not the Redneck

Pre-Hyptnotized Peter

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A Break for the Ages

Got break from a great fall break last night. Had a good time, managed to get out of Potsdam for just under a week. Visited a couple of my old friends from high school and caused a bit of trouble at Geneseo.

Did a bit of hacking on Xen related stuff, but not to much as I was generally disconnected from the internet. I didn’t get to do the IBM Mainframe challenge due to the generally suckiness of Adelphia Powerlink. It kept on going up and down about every 5 minutes throughout the day on Monday. Pretty shitty, but probably doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t have enough time to complete part 3.

And my OSDL contest entry is a bit larger than last year. I’m going to be working on hacking the Linux OOM Killer and possibly implementing Xen Overcommit support so you could swap entire domains in a fashion similiar to z/VM.

Xen Management

Jeremy and I have started work on our new Xen Management tool. It’s going to be a Java servlet based tool called jXenophilia. Its part of our CS450 work so we won’t be able to release it until the end of the semester but its going to have some pretty cool features. It’s going to support a plugin architecture and use the Xen Webservices API that I’m going to develop for Xen3. We’re also looking into adding support for deploying guest images, and doing guest configuration using templates or inheritance. In other Xen news I’m working on modifying the OOM killer to ask Xen’s balloon driver for more memory.

The new hotness

Earlier this week my laptop decided it was finally time to die. Monday morning the video card decided to stop working. After a couple of days of using ssh to connect to my laptop I decided it was a good time to get a new machine.

I ended up getting a new 12 inch iBook. It’s pretty sweet and I like it alot. I also purchased iWork after trying Keynote in the store. And yes I drove all the way to Syracuse because I couldn’t stand to wait a week for Apple to ship me a laptop. I’ll probably be posting some pictures later on this weekend.

It’s that time of year again (A small lab update)

It’s almost time to head back to the North Country and get ready for the semester. This semester is going to be pretty interesting as we’ve got new desktops from IBM that we’ve got to get setup in the first couple of weeks. We’re also going to be getting some new servers at some point during the semester, including the ES7000 from Unisys.

Hopefully we’ll have some interesting projects on deck. The web page is going to be redone, and hopefully a lot more work is going to be done with Xen.

On a bit of a random note, how many people would be interested in doing an Alumni weekend/event at some point during this semester? If you are drop me an email.

Well no one else said anything

Clarkson won the University Prize for the OSDL Data Center LinuxIniative Tuxmaster’s Invitational. We’ll be getting an 8 way Itanium 2 ES7000 running SLES 9 (and Xen of course) at some point this fall. Todd and Patty’s entry took first and Ed, Jeremy, Justins, and mine took 2nd place. (The PSP rocks by theway). On the contest website, www.tuxmasters.com it looks like they’re gearing up for another contest already.

OLS Day 4

OLS Day 4

After a morning of hacking on random stuff, we went to the sysfs filesystem. Sysfs is a filesystem that is based off of ramfs and is used to display information about the system devices. He went over why the sysfs was created and how he created it. He then explained some of the deficiencies that are in the current implementation of the sysfs. They are currently looking to build a new userspace library for sysfs.

The closing keynote was by Dave Jones, one of Redhat’s kernel leaders. He had some very interesting points on how tools need to be improved in order to make developers much more effective. He showed examples of how Static Code analysis has reduced the number of bugs greatly. He also explained why it is so difficult to regression test the Linux kernel. Jeremy and I are probably going to do tutorials at some point during the semester on doing static code analysis and using code profiling tools. He also had some great ideas about a solution to problems with bugs not getting in the upstream bugzilla’s. I’ll post more on my thoughts on a solution later. Hopefully someone can pick this up for a COSI project this semester.

After the keynote Mark, Sean, Ed and I headed off to dinner before Mark had to catch his flight to England. Tomorrow or next week will be the report on the closing party. Apparently it’s usually pretty wild and out of hand, so this should be very interesting.

OLS 3 (Virtualization Day)

OLS 3 (Virtualization Day)

Went to the Linux Virtualization on Virtual Iron VFE talk. It turned out to basically be and advertisement for Virtual Iron, a company that has written their own virtualization layer that is targeted at corporate data centers. They had some pretty interesting ideas, but they did not seem like they were looking to scale their product up to more than tens of machines and a large portion of their product was closed source with no plans to open source it. I also spent a decent amount of the morning hacking on various little projects with Xen, which should be released shortly.

I was looking forward to going to the talk on Beagle by Jon Trowbridge, but United Airlines screwed up his flight, so he couldn’t make it in, and he couldn’t find someone else to give the talk.

Ed had a pretty amazing comment today. He was surprised at the number of women that are actually attending the conference. There’s probably around ten women here, in a crowd of approximately seven hundred and fiftey developers. Ed’s definitely got a very weird view on women in Computer Science.

In the afternoon the intense Xen presentations started. The first one was presented by Mike Day from IBM on using Xen to Supercharge OS Deployment. He went over how virtual machines make deploying instances of Linux faster because if you create a standard hardware configuration you can automate deployment of your Linux systems. This talk seemed to be geared more towards a system administrator, as he went over several different ways you can normalize your hardware to reduce installation time. One of the problems with reusing filesystems in deployment is that each time it is reused you have to customize parts of the filesystem unless you are using a read only filesystem.

He had some very interesting points on the weaknesses of Xen. These are some of the things that we were starting to address this past Spring with Xenophilia and I am hoping to address even further this fall in some of my work in CS450 and possibly my independent study. Currently there is no mechanism for customizing images as they are deployed, and there is no integration of images with the Xen domain configuration tools. He was thinking about adding scripting support into the domain configuration files to allow the customization of images. They developed a proof of concept, Xen Container Syntax that allowed users to add domain specific configuration information into the domain configuration files. This idea has several problems and is probably going to be reworked from the ground up with support for Xen 3.0. It was written using bash scripting. It’d be interesting if you could use some sort of template or inheritance system to create the domain configuration files. After seeing this presentation I guess I will have to rethink the way I was going to generate customized disk images for when a domain comes up.

The second talk that I attended was a case study of using Usermode Linux to test multiple Linux distributions that was performed by engineers at Intel. It started out with a brief introduction to the LSB. They validated distributions using the runtime tests for the LSB to make sure that the distributions are LSB compliant. He gave a brief introduction to UML, and the guest distribution actually runs as a process in a host. They ran their testing on a 4 Gigahertz Hyperthreaded server with one gigabyte of ram, and two 15,000 RPM SCSI disks.

The next talk was “Testing the Xen Hypervisor and Linux Virtual Machines” by Paul Larson from the LTC. When testing the Hypervisor they were able to reuse many of their tests from testing of the Linux Kernel. They did have to write new tests for the testing of the hypercalls into the hypervisor and they also wrote tests for the tools interface. They created a test interface called Xenfc that is not a systematic test, it randomly generates data to test the hypervisor. This approach has been much more useful in helping developers find corner cases. It was extremely interesting to here some of the ways that they have automated the integration testing of the kernel and hypervisor.

At the Common Virtualization Infrastructure BOF Rik Van Riel discussed some of the new memory management techniques, included page hinting for swapping paging. Problems with over committing pages and having the hypervisor swap the pages to disk was also discussed, but apparently not all architectures can do that at a page granularity level. Currently the hypervisor on s390 has the ability to swap pages. Paravirtualization is also in development at VMWare, and is going to be implemented in their VMWare ESX Server. They are currently working on SMP optimizations, split drivers, and 64 bit support along with a couple of other things. Their system is a non cooperative paravirtualization system, so it’s performance isn’t the best but, it can run transparently.

I also learned of a new addiction Frozen Bubble from Mark Williamson. It’s written in Perl using the SDL module and I’m finding that very scary. There’s also a java port if a game programmed in perl is to scary for you. This is going to make it much more difficult to actually get real work done on xen-get.

The Fedora Foundation is currently being setup after the announcement in the beginning of June. The Foundation is not going to be a subsidiary of Redhat it is probably going to be a Not For Profit Organization with a Board of Directors.

The release schedule was extended due to the non Redhat employees that are now very involved in the release project. They have several big projects on tap for Fedora Core 5 which include:

A rewrite of Anaconda using yum and supporting Xen

A new Fedora Extras build system

A new update notification

Xen 3.0 is possibly on the schedule

A Live CD is a possibility (it has to be created in a sustainable fashion)

GDM early login for FC5

Most of the Stateless Linux changes will be merged for FC5, but it looks like the lab is going to be the test monkeys as their hasn’t been a real deployment yet.