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dowdle | Jon Corbet wrote a piece yesterday that will be in next week's Linux Weekly News entitled, "Some numbers and thoughts on the stable kernels". The point of the article is to review the last five years of stable mainline kernel releases and the updates to them. As you may know, Parallels / OpenVZ has a 2.6.32 "devel" branch and a goal of making it the next "stable" branch. They have had several 2.6.32 releases and have been putting a lot of work into it. This work has also lead to 29 patches so far that have made their way into the mainline 2.6.32 kernel updates. This ranks Parallels the 9th top updates contributor (or 11th if you count "None" and "Unknown"). It should be noted that these mainline contributions benefit everyone and are not OpenVZ specific... just in case someone were to get confused and wrongly think the patches were an attempt to get OpenVZ into the mainline. Want to read about it for yourself? It is currently subscriber-only content that should becoming freely available on September 9th. I've been an LWN reader since the beginning and a paying subscriber since they went to a subscription model. I can provide a "subscriber-link" that will allow non-subscribers to read the article as an enticement to become a subscriber. Once it is freely released, I'll try and remember to update this post with a new link. To the Parallels / OpenVZ developers I say... Thanks for the continuing hard work on 2.6.32, your contributions are appreciated... and I look forward to the upcoming "stable" 2.6.32 OpenVZ kernel. | ||
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dowdle | I'm on vacation in Memphis, Tennessee visiting family. A couple of weeks before going on vacation I looked for a Linux Users Group in Memphis to see if I could attend or even possibly present at one of their meetings. The Group of Linux Users Memphis (GOLUM) has been around for well over a decade and continues to have an active mailing list... but their website was outdated and they hadn't had a meeting in the last two years. My inquiry lead to a resurgence of GOLUM with a desire to start having monthly meetings again. They had to locate a venue for the meetings, set a date and time, etc... and I will be presenting "Introduction to OpenVZ" for their first new meeting. For details see their website... which has only recently been redone and is still in the beginnings stage. Before the topic was picked I gave them 5 or 6 potential topics to pick from and they voted and selected OpenVZ. Seems that OpenVZ is not well known in Memphis but I hope to change that. | ||
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k001 | When I have a high temperature, i.e. fever, I am very talkative. I just measured it up to 39.6deg;C (103.3°F). Now I don't have anyone to talk to verbally, so I'm blogging. You have been warned. But no, this post is not contageous. I am in Ottawa since last night, despite all the challanges on the way -- ( really, click here if you want to read the whole story ) The big problem is I caught a cold during the first flight, and now I feel strange. I can not listen to the talks (except for the keynote), I am taking pills ( a story about pills, way smaller ) and such, gargling the NaCl solution, and all that. So far it helps a little -- I either have a fever or feel like a slowpoke under the drugs. My talk is moved from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning (not because of me, and I only found it while getting a badge). I hope I will be less of a hot vegetable by that time. I need to make it because I already did most of it. | ||
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dowdle Current Mood: awake | Just wanted to mention a few news items from the OpenVZ Project. Updated vzctl - vzctl 3.0.24 has been released. Even though the version number only changed from 3.0.23 to 3.0.24 there are a ton of changes, fixes and some feature additions. Of special interest is the --swappages option as well as being able to refer to a container by its name rather than requiring the CTID with vzmigrate. Overall it was a long overdue, much appreciated update. Updated Official OS Templates - The last wiki notice is dated April 27th but looking today at the dates on the OS Templates they appear to have been updated May 27th. One thing to note is that there are now OS Templates for Ubuntu 10.04 which I'm sure Ubuntu folks will be happy about. Beta Fedora 13 OS Templates - And speaking of OS Templates, Kir just released Beta OS Templates for Fedora 13. The day Fedora 13 was released I tried creating my own OS Templates by taking Fedora 12 containers and upgrading them but ran into a snag. With Fedora 13 a lot of new stuff has been added to the init setup and some of it causes a container to just hang during init. I was glad to see the beta OS Templates released. I created containers from them, made my own changes, and then uploaded those to the contrib section. As luck would have it, later in the afternoon the Fedora Project release a whole bunch of updates and among them was a new initscripts package. I suspected that when I upgraded my container whatever changes the OpenVZ folks had made to the init setup that made it work in a container would be wiped out and I was correct as upgrading the initscripts package did indeed make the container get stuck in the init process upon container reboot. I ended up filing two bugs: 1566 and 1567 and await their joyful resolution. *** Please note*** Any URLs mentioned (and the information they contain) in this posting are time sensitive and will surely be outdated not long after posting. | ||
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k001 | I am still at the OpenVZ booth at LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin. At least two people asked me about the status of OpenVZ kernel for the upcoming Debian Squeeze. Specifically, they said, there is no openvz kernel in "testing" repository (i.e. what will become Squeeze when it will be released). My guess is some more people interesting in that, so here's the public answer. We are working pretty close with the Debian kernel team, you can see some traces of that on either debian-kernel AT lists.debian.org or debian AT openvz.org mailing lists. Specifically, we work together to bring good quality OpenVZ kernel to Squeeze, and this was one of the main reasons for us to port to 2.6.32. But yesterday we tried to search for openvz linux-image on packages.debian.org and it gave us no results for testing. I then emailed Max Attems (who maintains our kernels in Debian) and this is his response:it should be there now, the switch to libata did uphold testing Indeed, the kernel is now there. So yes, Squeeze will have OpenVZ kernel, and I guess it can also be used by people who switched to Ubuntu 10.4. | ||
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k001 | I am standing here at the LinuxTag 2010 event, so if you are in Berlin this week come to our booth to say hello (and maybe recommend a local beer place to go). One visitor asked me if it's possible to run Firefox inside a container (with the main purpose to browse insecure sites). Yes, it is possible, there are two ways -- using Xvnc and SSH's X forwarding. I just implemented it here (using the latter way), and want to share the experience, because there are a few rough edges here and there. We start with the "vanilla" Fedora 12 template: ( Read more... ) | ||
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k001 | We have just announced that we stop making new releases for OpenVZ kernel branches 2.6.24, 2.6.26, and 2.6.18. So, from now on we only have 2.6.27, 2.6.32, RHEL4-2.6.9 and RHEL5-2.6.18. Removing the number of parallel kernel branches we have to maintain really helps to concentrate on supporting the remaining ones and moving to mainline. I hope that doesn't affect anyone too much -- from where I stand most users run either stable (i.e. RHEL5-2.6.18) or bleeding edge (2.6.32, before it used to be 2.6.27). In any case, we are not dropping support for vendor kernels, such as OpenVZ kernels in Debian and Ubuntu -- those are still supported from us for the lifetime of the distributions that carry it, we will help with OpenVZ bugs in those kernels through the usual channel. On the remaining branches. Last Thursday we did an update to 2.6.32 kernel fixing some nasty bugs found in the first public version, and today we updated 2.6.27 kernel as well. Speaking of 2.6.27, it will eventually be dropped as well, but we will keep maintaining it for at least a few more months. Stable kernel update (RHEL5.5 based, 028stab069...) is currently in testing, but don't expect it to be released real soon now -- previous experience tells us that .y updates are not that easy. We also anticipate to open RHEL6-2.6.32 branch soon, since Red Hat already shooted a beta of their upcoming release. | ||
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k001 | Today I came across the page which compares OpenVZ to KVM to Xen. Leaving Xen aside, from that one it looks like KVM is ways better, it got all the green pluses, while OpenVZ got all the dull minuses, except for a few features where it says "limited support". For example, from the author's POV, KVM supports cool features such as "Independent kernel" and "Independent kernel modules" , while OpenVZ lacks all that. I am not mentioning "Full control on sockets and processes" -- definitely, such things as sockets and processes are completely out of control when you use OpenVZ, to the extent that you can not distinguish between a process, a socket, and a potato! (Was that sarcasm? Yes, in fact I don't have an idea of what do they mean by that statement...) But such a comparison is inspiring, so I invested 15 minutes of my time and made my own, titled Car vs bike. It clearly states that a car is better than a bike -- its capacity is higher and it doesn't require lots of muscle power. After all, it has powered steering wheel (not mentioning powered windows) and can come with an automatic gearbox, air conditioning and even a sunroof! A bike, from the other side, is missing a lot of features -- even windshield wipers are absent which are standard for every car since about 1925! Actually, I didn't stop there and made yet another comparison, titled Bike vs car. Now it's perfectly clear that a bike is a better choice than a car, since it's cheaper, ecologically clean, and you can even take it with you on a train! A car is big and heavy, it requires periodical refuelling and a parking spot. Both comparisons are on the openvz wiki, so feel free to edit and add more features! | ||
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k001 | Recently we have opened a git repository for 2.6.32 based OpenVZ kernel. The port to 2.6.32 kernel was primarily targeted for the next Debian "Squeeze" release which is due in a few months. The kernel is already there, kudos to Max Attempts That doesn't mean we forgot users of RPM-based distros. Yesterday we have uploaded the first 2.6.32 release, named after the Soviet/Russian cosmonaut Viktor Afanasyev. Yes, the kernels from 2.6.32 branch will be named after cosmonauts. Please update your openvz.repo, enable the 2.6.32 kernel repo, install this kernel and play with it (not on your production machines though). | ||
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k001 | I am flying from Moscow to Los Angeles tomorrow. It's 13 hours in the air but right to the place I need (and want) to be -- SCALE8x. Just before SCALE, though, I will be in San Francisco for a day and a half -- let me know if you want to meet for a glass of beer or shot of coffee. No vodka, I only drink it when it's cold. Right, Moscow is very cold in the winter... My plans about new t-shirts for SCALE are not fulfilled; instead I want to print some stickers/labels and maybe something like postcards. I am still designing those, hope to print overnight at Fedex Office when I arrive. An OpenVZ sticker is what I always wanted personally -- my notebook cover carries a lot of stickers (mostly related to GNU and Linux), but OpenVZ one is missing. So I am kinda using my official position to get what I want :) -- if I am not mistaken the correct English word is jobbery. In the meantime, and this is now fully official, OpenVZ kernel team is working on porting our stuff to Linux kernel 2.6.32. This will take about a month, and we hope to have it working in time to include into next Debian release. While 2.6.32 is some time away, we keep updating our stable (RHEL5-based) kernel. You can have a sneak preview of newest kernel changelog here. One feature worth noticing is added support for signalfd() syscall which is desperately needed by late versions of udevd and thus all the latest distros (like Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10) which you might want to run in a container. | ||
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