Top.Mail.Ru
? ?

Previous Entry | Next Entry

Containers mini-summit and Linux Symposium

While I am writing this, people are discussing the future of containers in the Linux Kernel at the containers mini-summit which is happening in Ottawa at the moment. You can check some rough notes from the event here. Three guys from OpenVZ team are there: Pavel Emelyanov, Denis Lunev, and Andrey Mirkin.

If you are attending Linux Symposium in Ottawa, note that this Friday, 25th, Andrey Mirkin will talk about containers checkpointing and live migration (12:00, Rockhopper room). It's going to be an interesting talk, do not miss it.

Also, this Wednesday, 23rd, Balbir Singh will lead a BoF on Memory Controller (17:45, Fiordland room). Memory controller is quite important for containers, and while some stuff are already in the mainline kernel, there's still lots to be discussed and developed in the area. You can think of this BoF as an extension to containers mini-summit.

Comments

dowdle
Jul. 28th, 2008 02:04 am (UTC)
Re: Linux Symposium paper tests OpenVZ along with others
Hmm, they used Ubuntu 7.10 for all of the testing and a non-stable OpenVZ branch - 2.6.22. I wonder how the test results would have varied if they had used a stable branch of the OpenVZ kernel... and like... a distro used in the mainstream for server virtualization. No disrespect to Ubuntu but it is known as a desktop/laptop distro and less as a server distro. Yes, I'm aware that there is a server version of Ubuntu but to the best of my knowledge, they didn't use that... not that there are any significant differences between Ubuntu Desktop and Server that I'm aware of.

I guess I can't really complain too much... because it is really some task to compare all of the virtualization products in a fair way. I do think that OpenVZ was at a disadvantage in their tests though.
dowdle
Jul. 28th, 2008 05:24 am (UTC)
What about the resource parameters?
Here's a direct link to the paper rather than having to find it included among so many other papers:

http://ols.fedoraproject.org/OLS/Reprints-2008/camargos-reprint.pdf

As everyone should know, OpenVZ and Linux-VServer have a number of resource parameters. By default OpenVZ's are all on and Linux-VServers are all off. The only resource the paper mentions is memory allocation. What about the rest? Differences in these settings can make for vastly differing results.

For me, this paper raises more questions than it answers... but I acknowledge that the task they took on was rather difficult. How does one pick what kernel to use for all of those virtualization methods? How does one pick a host node distro? Should they have used the same exact hardware in all tests but used the configurations / kernels / distros known to work well for each virtualization method? I think that would have been more of a real world test because I don't think many people are using OpenVZ on Ubuntu 7.10 systems using a 2.6.22 based kernel. But if they had used different kernels versions and distros... that would have raised a lot of questions too.

It should also be noted that when Linux-VServer's results were inconsistent with what they were expecting they did make considerable effort to look into it and find alternatives to explain or correct the inconsistency. I wish they had done that with OpenVZ but I can say from experience that the Linux-VServer developers are much easier to communicate with in real-time (via their IRC channel) than the OpenVZ developers who are mostly invisible except for bugzilla interactions and mailing lists.

I'm sure this is just one of the early tests among many more to come in the future.

I can only hope the results of this paper are studied further and if any real performance issues are found to be present in OpenVZ, that they are addressed. My personal experiences with OpenVZ has shown it to be almost exactly like that of the native system which is why I'm so puzzled by the results. Does the 2.6.22 release suck that bad or was it a bad configuration or are their results valid and reproducible?

Latest Month

July 2016
S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Comments

Powered by LiveJournal.com
Designed by Tiffany Chow