bk99.de entertain the web since 1997

bk99.de
g · Linux & UnixCurated

OpenVZ to be brought into the Linux kernel

Summary

According to CNet, in 2006 SWsoft wanted to bring its free virtualisation technology OpenVZ into the official Linux kernel, with support from Red Hat. OpenVZ sets up virtual private servers that share one kernel and are therefore very efficient. At the same time Red Hat was pushing the competing technology Xen and announced Xen virtualisation for the next RHEL.

Ideas

  • Virtualisation at operating system level shares one kernel between many environments.
  • The developers saw it as the next step after multi-user and multitasking.
  • OpenVZ was the free core of the commercial product Virtuozzo.
  • Red Hat relied on OpenVZ and Xen at the same time.
  • OpenVZ needed kernel changes for resource management that first had to be accepted.

Insights

  • The path into the mainline kernel decides a technology’s long-term spread.
  • In the kernel, competing approaches are often broken down into more general building blocks.

Facts

  • OpenVZ came from SWsoft, the maker of Virtuozzo.
  • Red Hat was already integrating Xen into Fedora.

References

Critique

  • The report is based on a secondary report; a statement from the kernel maintainers Torvalds and Morton is missing.

Remarks

  • OpenVZ never made it fully into the kernel, but its developers contributed significantly to namespaces and cgroups, on which LXC and Docker are built.

Recommendations

  • For containers, rely on mainline functions such as namespaces and cgroups.
  • Choose between containers and virtual machines according to isolation needs, not just performance.

Read the original article

Search the Web Archive

g · 2024

Linux kernel to get Windows API for synchronisation

In January 2024 Codeweavers developer Elizabeth Figura proposed the NTSync kernel driver, which implements functions of Windows NT thread synchronisation directly in the Linux kernel. Predecessors such as Esync and Fsync/Futex2 reached their limits because the complex NT semantics could not be reproduced correctly with existing primitives. In some games NTSync is said to increase the frame rate by 50 to 150 percent, while in others it changes hardly anything.

g · 2024

US winter storm forces a break in kernel development

In January 2024 Linus Torvalds announced an enforced break in kernel development because a winter storm in Oregon had knocked out power and internet at Torvalds’ home. The Finnish-born developer remarked sarcastically that “storm” and “winter” meant little more than some wind and just under minus ten degrees there. Around 100,000 people in the Portland area were without power; during a similar outage, repairs had taken more than a week.

g · 2022

Kernel developer wants to escape “dependency hell”

In January 2022 Ingo Molnar presented the “Fast Kernel Headers” project, a comprehensive overhaul of the Linux kernel’s roughly 10,000 header files. With more than 2,200 patches changing more than half of all source files, the “dependency hell” was to be untangled. According to initial benchmarks, build time was reduced by 78 percent, and in some cases considerably more for incremental builds.