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Thu, 06 Sep 2007

Linux and enterprises.

First enterprise presentation was from DreamWorks. They have more than 600 linux desktops and even higher number of linux machines in the rendering farm. They run own application both batching and iteractive and way how Linux memory management works is not always the best one. Swapping was the main problematic issue with short coverage of swap prefetch patches (each time this words were said the whole audience exploded :). Another issue is OOM condition and oom-killer, which usually kills not what is supposed to be, but it is quite small problem comparing to swap troubles. The last problem discussed is NFS mounting and attributes issues, discussion showed that problem is being solved and there are patches flying around to fix the issue.

Next enterprise client was Credit Suisse bank. This guys want to talk with kernel community directly, since work with distros usually turns out to be completely unproductive. Discussed issues include kernel scheduler, real-time linux ( it was showed that this patchset greatly improves theirs performance without any special tuning), linux diagnostics (some kind of SystemTap, uTRACE and other solutions), TCP/IP issues (Nagle algorithm jitter, various new features of the protocol, like quickacks and slowstart changes). Number of desired features was highlighted related to linux networking like message passing protocols, RDMA and tcp/ip offloading usage, small performance tests of the different technologies and NICs (with and without offloading features) was shown. This rised quite unhealthy discussion with pointing possible bugs in the presentation data, with possibly unconfigured things on the testing side. It was shown that having test setup handy will result in the immediate fix of the problem, but having such testing environment is not always possible.

The last enterprise presentation was from Linux Foundation. First virtualization was concerned with highlighted ideas of sponsoring community developers and providing some kind of management and workgroup for controlling the whole process (which was pointed by audience as a worthless idea). Next issue discussed was power management and so called 'green linux', it was pointed that some areas are not yet fully covered like embedded and servers, and fair amount of works needs to be done pushing hardware vendors. Driver development presentation showed a desire to have open source drivers (surprise), promoting NDA program to allow developers to have an access to hardware, and some kind of business model to work with open source drivers. Presentation briefly showed security issues (like encrypted filesystems and usability of existing features like selinux), scalability (NUMA features, FS and IO scalability isses were described), kernel debugger (it was shown the possibility to sponsor a developer to cleanup and submit KGDB), IPv6 (mostly requirements to make a sertification and meet telco market). Testing projects and efforts in automative process wre highlighted. ZFS easy administration was shown as example of a good taste. SystemTap market readiness was shown, but audience (especially Christoph Hellwig) replied very cold - code is not even remotely in the mergeable form, existense number of wrong design issues in DTrace and SystemTap was highlighted, so essentially probability of its merge is quite low. The last issue discussed is RDMA hooks and need for some kind of generic stack for this technology, which is a bit frowned upon in the community because of it exists like a black box without any ability to debug and fix bugs there.

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