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live from SCALE7x

Greetings from SCALE7x! Today will be the second (and the last) day of the show. Yesterday I did a presentation titled "Recent Advances in the Linux Kernel resource management". The scope of the talk is much more technical and narrow than my usual talk about containers. More to say, I was focusing more on mainstream Linux kernel (i.e. cgroups and memory controller) than on OpenVZ kernel (i.e. user beancounters).

I think the talk was well received and I had about 10 different interesting questions, one is puzzling enough so I was not able to provide a good answer. This is definitely a sign of a good audience.

If anyone is interested in slides from my presentation, they are available: OpenOffice ODP (276K), PDF (409K), PPT (437K).

Getting ready for SCALE7x

In about a week I will be in Los Angeles for the annual Southern California Linux Expo, a.k.a. SCALE. It is quite a big event. Well, not quite as big as LinuxWorld or Linux Symposium, but still big enough and growing bigger each year. I'd like to say this conference is of good spirit, whatever that means.

Like the last year, we were granted a booth in the dot-org area (#63), plus I will be giving a talk titled "Recent advances in the Linux resource management", talking about cgroups, memory controller and stuff. Because of the booth I am not coming along -- Lesya Novaselskaya will hostess the booth. Lesya is working for Parallels as a Quality Assurance engineer, her job is to test various software including OpenVZ in order to make it bullet-proof and rock solid.

We still have lots of things to do to be fully prepared for the event. I have already created a brand new OpenVZ t-shirt design codenamed "kernel classics" which you can see on the right (also, here is the back design in hi-res). It plays around the fact that we name our 2.6.26- and 2.6.27-based kernels after famous Russian writers and painters, respectively. If you will be at the conference and tell us your OpenVZ story, you get your t-shirt. If you are not going to visit SCALE but eager to get such a t-shirt (not the same since I'm ordering from a different place, but with the very same graphics) you can buy it from cafepress (previous "container lifecycle" t-shirt is also available).

I hope I will also prepare the new DVD images containing a live CD OpenVZ distro which could be used to get a feeling of what OpenVZ is without installing it, plus all the latest kernels, tools and templates.
We just published our Debian/Ubuntu appliance builder for OpenVZ (of course perfectly usable on Proxmox VE).

Short description

Creating high quality appliances is a difficult task and requires deep knowledge of the underlying operating system. So we created the 'Debian Appliance Builder' to simplify that task. 'dab' is a script to automate the creation of OpenVZ appliances. It is basically a rewrite of debootstrap in perl, but uses OpenVZ instead of chroot and generates OpenVZ templates. Another difference is that it supports multi-stage building of templates. That way you can execute arbitrary scripts between package installation steps to accomplish what you want.

Furthermore, some common tasks are fully automated - like setting up a database server (mysql or postgres). To accomplish minimal template creation time, packages are cached to a local directory, so you do not need a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror (although this would speed up the first run). All generated templates includes an appliance description file. Those can be used to build appliance repositories.

Virtual appliances are a well known and quite successful way to demonstrate and run server software. But till now, no high quality appliance builder for OpenVZ was available.

Anybody is talking about the economic and financial crisis – a good chance to bring powerful open source software to the enterprise customer – start now using OpenVZ for virtual appliances!

All details:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Debian_Appliance_Builder

Best Regards,

Martin Maurer

martin@proxmox.com
http://www.proxmox.com
____________________________________________________________________
Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH
Kohlgasse 51/10, 1050 Vienna, Austria


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2.6.27 kernel and Russian painters

A new 2.6.27-based OpenVZ branch is opened, and the first 2.6.27-based OpenVZ is released.

The idea of using names instead of numbers for kernel releases is working for 2.6.26, and we decided to have some fun with 2.6.27 kernels, too. These kernels are [to be] named after famous Russian painters, of course in the alphabetical order.

First 2.6.27 OpenVZ kernel is named after Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Aivazovsky is a great painter and I'd love to add a link to some of his masterpieces here, but while trying to find a good reproduction of "The Ninth Wave" I realized that a typical notebook/PC is incapable of displaying such art. Then you try to fit a 2x3 meters painting into a 22" computer screen, nothing good is to be expected. Even in case of high resolution copy stored in a lossless format you either see a full picture but details are lost, or you see some part of it with all the details but then you don't see the full picture. So be aware that a painting that you see online is a pathetic shadow of what you can enjoy in a real (i.e. offline) museum or art gallery.

The 2.6.27-aivazovsky kernel, on the other side, is perfect for you PC, so enjoy.

New year, new stuff

Consider this as a new year gifts from Father Frost, or Dad Moroz, or Santa Clous, or me, if you so prefer.

First gift is a new fresh set of precreated templates, which spent quite some time in beta before. Those are the same templates, but updated couple of days ago, plus there is Ubuntu-8.10 added. I hope I will update those monthly or so, since now I have some automation in place. A 'date' column was added to list of template files on wiki so you can easily see how old are those.

Second one is new shiny SSL certificates for https://wiki.openvz.org/ and https://bugzilla.openvz.org/. I call it shiny because they are neither self-signed nor bough from a commercial certificate authority. As you can see they are CAcert.org certificates. CAcert is an organisation which is building so-called web of trust, and acts as a certificate authority for its members. If you need free certificates, you are welcome to join. And, if you decide to trust CAcert as a certificate authority and your browser isn't configured for it yet, you have to import their root certificate.

Finally, a new 2.6.24 kernel is coming out later today. Others will follow. Update: here it is, 2.6.24-ovz007.1.
Since the last intro video I made was over 1.5 years ago, I thought I'd make a new one.


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New vzctl and vzquota

Today is definitely a day of releases.

OpenVZ project has released both new vzctl and vzquota tools today.

New vzctl has a handful of new small features and a bunch of bugfixes, including compatibility with recent glibc, bash, and kernel headers.

New vzquota has only one (but quite useful) new feature -- an ability to explain what's wrong when it can not turn container's disk quota on or off. Recent OpenVZ kernels have a feature to report open files in container's private area, and now with the new vzquota the feature is finally available for mere mortals.

In the meantime Parallels has released Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0 -- and that's just a coincidence, I'm sure they do not sync their release cycles with OpenVZ. Or maybe it's not a coincidence... We're sitting in the same office and for the last few weeks they've been providing free late dinners because of their release, that maybe made me leave the office later and thus maybe gave more time to work on OpenVZ tools. :)
When my colleague Pavel Emelyanov returned from the 2008 Linux kernel summit back in September he brought a small present for me -- a Gumstix Overo (every LKS participant got one for free; yet another reason to become a high-profile kernel developer!). Overo is a computer (well, actually a set of boards and cables) with a CPU board the size of a gum stick, featuring TI OMAP3 CPU, 128 megs of RAM and a microSD slot. It also has 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but those happens to be completely dead as this the first beta release of hardware.

For the last few days I was digging into a project to make OpenVZ running on this Overo thing. That involved patching OpenVZ kernel to support ARM architecture, building vzctl package (.ipk) for ARM using bitbake, and creating a template.

It was amazingly easy to port the OpenVZ kernel to ARM; you can see here that besides a big-all-in-one-openvz-for-2.6.27 patch I only had to add 4 tiny ARM-specific patches (1, 2, 3, 4). For vzctl, it was even easier -- all I had to do is to add openvz syscall numbers for ARM which were added, and create a bitbake recipe file.

Creating a template for ARM architecture was tougher but I managed to win that fight, too -- you can find a Debian Lenny template here.

Here is an except from a terminal session showing OpenVZ on Overo:a copy/paste from terminalCollapse )

Please note that all this is still in very alpha stage -- there are errors, bugs, ugly warnings, you have to modify some things in place etc. But it's working. If someone is interested in running OpenVZ on ARM hardware, please let me know -- leave a comment here or email kir (A) openvz (.) org.

Update: comments disabled due to spam

2.6.26 kernel and Russian writers

We are going to release first 2.6.26-based kernel soon -- it went to testing today and hopefully will be released next week.

We are also changing the versioning scheme -- instead of boring numbers like 001, 002, 003 etc., every 2.6.26 OpenVZ kernel will be named after one or another great Russian writer. We will do it in alphabetical order so there will be no upgrade pain.

As you can see here, first 2.6.26 is named after Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov. I personally enjoy his The Master and Margarita (it's truly a masterpiece; although I'm afraid a lot is lost in translation) and Heart of a Dog.

And yes, we are doing that just for fun.
Robert Nelson was kind enough to agree to an email-based interview which readers of the OpenVZ Users mailing list will have already seen. Robert has written a replacement for vzpkg (currently named vzpkg2) and has greatly enhanced it with the addition of a package named pkg-cacher. For an introduction to OS Templates and the tools used to manage them as well as Robert's fantastic answers, see:

Interview with vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher creator Robert Nelson

Obligatory quote:
ML: You have added a number of features / capabilities to vzpkg. Could you give us an overview of what's new?

Robert: I think the most significant change over the stock version of vzpkg is the separation of the packager specific code from the higher level code. This allows scripts to be written to support other package managers like apt which is used on Debian and Ubuntu.

The other slightly less significant change is the introduction of the concept of a hierarchical structure to the template meta data. Information which is the same for all versions and platforms of a distribution need only be specified once. If there is a need for separate settings for a specific version it can be overridden by a file lower in the template meta data tree.

Also new packager-independent commands have been added for managing packages in installed containers.
One thing worth mentioning is that while the number of OS Template Metadata packages provided by the OpenVZ Project is quite limited, Robert has created new metadata packages for vzpkg2 that allow for easily building CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu OS Templates. If I counted correctly, Robert's new metadata packages make it easy to build 44 different OS Templates. Wow!

It might take a few more weeks before vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher are finalized and added to the OpenVZ Project repositories. If you don't want to wait and would like to help out with testing, Robert has posted some instructions to the OpenVZ Users mailing list and here is a link to the archive for the time period in question:

http://openvz.org/pipermail/users/2008-September/thread.html

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