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Last week I went to Cambridge, UK with my colleague Pavel Emelyanov to take part in the LinuxConf Europe and the containers mini-summit, as well as the Linux Kernel Summit session devoted to containers. Pavel, who works in the OpenVZ kernel team, is now working on integrating our technology into the mainstream Linux kernel. To his credit, the memory controller and the PID namespace patch (see my recent blog post), which were integrated into -mm recently, are mostly due to him.

The first event in Cambridge was LinuxConf Europe, where we both presented our talks on containers -- mine was a general introduction to virtualization, containers, and OpenVZ, while Pavel described some intimate details of memory controller (read "beancounters") implementation.

The next day we had to skip the LinuxConf to take part in the containers mini-summit. This was an event for all the containers shareholders to discuss what and how to present the containers topic at the Kernel Summit. Unfortunately, Eric Biederman (Linux Networx) and Paul Menage (Google) came later, and Balbir Singh (IBM) was buzy with VM mini-summit, so we did this mini-summit in two rounds. First round was with Pavel (OpenVZ), Cedric Le Goater (IBM), Oren Laadan (of Zap -- a checkpointing and live migration project), Kamezava Hiroyuki (of Fujitsu Japan, mostly interested in resource management), and Paul (who joined us over Skype). The second round was with Eric, Paul, and Balbir -- the next day in the hall. The results of this mini-summit are a few threads on containers@ mailing list, plus a few documents here.

Finally, there was 30-minute topic on the Kernel Summit devoted to the containers. Paul and Eric have summarized what we have done so far, and what are we going to do next. There was not much discussion, which I think is healthy because now everybody knows about containers and why they are needed. Slides from the talk are available here. Jonathan Corbet (of Linux Weekly News) also provided a summary of the topic (this is still subscriber-only content, but since I'm a subscriber I can share a free link with you).

It feels like we are making good progress and are on the right path to a containers implementation in the Linux kernel. You can see some people helping to make this happen in this photo. Click the image for larger version.

Comments

( 2 comments — Leave a comment )
dowdle
Sep. 17th, 2007 04:58 pm (UTC)
Linux Kernel Summit
Thanks for sharing your take on the event. I really enjoyed all of Jon's content over at LWN as it really helps to illuminate the whole kernel development process, warts and all.

I have a question about the recent work on the port of OpenVZ to the 2.6.22 kernel... there was an article about it and they make it sound as if migration features somehow just appeared in this release.

The official press release mentions that there was new PID (Process ID) namespace code that replaced the existing OpenVZ code... and that this code was "an essential prerequisite for live migration". Just out of curiousity, what does the new code offer that the old code didn't? (if you can explain it in layman terms)
k001
Oct. 1st, 2007 06:23 pm (UTC)
Re: Linux Kernel Summit
Well, they catched it a bit wrong. The press release says in 2.6.22 we abandoned our own old PID namespaces in favor of a new PID namespace implementation that made its way to mainstream (written mostly by Pavel Emelyanov (so it's again our own implementation, but done differently, taking into account all that the other parties wanted), currently sitting in -mm tree). This move (i.e. switching to new PID namespaces) was done to broad testing coverage of this code which will appear in mainstream, in order to see it fits well and is bug-free. This is like eating our own dogfood.

The same press release goes on to say that PID namespaces is a required prerequisite for live migration (since you have to have the same PIDs when you restore).

Of course it does not say this is the first kernel with live migration...
( 2 comments — Leave a comment )

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