And we are coming to Prague, too! This time, there will be as many as six people and two talks from us, plus we will held a memory cgroup controller meeting.
The following OpenVZ/Parallels people are coming:
James Bottomley, Parallels virtualization CTO
Kir Kolyshkin, OpenVZ project manager
Pavel Emelyanov, OpenVZ kernel team leader (he's also taking part in Linux Kernel Summit)
Glauber Costa, OpenVZ kernel developer
Maxim Patlasov, OpenVZ kernel developer
Andrey Vagin, OpenVZ kernel developer
Two talks will be presented. Since linuxsymposium.org site is currently down, let me quote talk descriptions here.
1. Container in a file by Maxim Patlasov.
One of the feature differences between hypervisors and containers is the ability to store a virtual machine image in a single file, since most containers exist as a chroot within the host OS rather than as fully independent entities. However, the ability to save and restore state in a machine image file is invaluable in managing virtual machine life cycles in the data centre.
This talk will début a new loopback device which gives all the advantages of virtual machine images by storing the container in a file
while preserving the benefits of sharing significant portions with the host OS. We will compare and contrast the technology with the
traditional loopback device, and describe some changes to the ext4 filesystem which make it more friendly to new loopback device needs.
This talk will be technical in nature but should be accessible to people interested in cloud, virtualisation and container technologies.
2. OpenVZ and Linux kernel testing by Andrey Vagin.
One of the less appealing but very important part of software development is testing. This talk tries to summarize our 10+ years of experience in Linux kernel testing (including OpenVZ and Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernels). Overall description of our test system is provided, followed by details on some of the interesting test cases developed. Finally, a few anecdotal cases of bugs found will be presented.
In a sense, the talk is an answer to Andrew Morton's question from 2007: "I'm curious. For the past few months, people@openvz.org have discovered (and fixed) an ongoing stream of obscure but serious and quite long-standing bugs. How are you discovering these bugs?"
Talk is of interest to those concerned about kernel quality, and in general to people doing development and testing.
Finally, there will be a memcg meeting. Since LinuxCon will be right after the Kernel Summit, a number of kernel guys will still be there so anyone interested in cgroups can come. This meeting is a continuation of our recent discussion at Linux Plumbers (see etherpad and presentations).
Second, my friend Bernhard and I helped Kir with his booth on the LinuxTag. It was a great pleasure for us because Kir is a really cool guy. We had the chance to hear and learn a lot about Kernel development and OpenVZ in general. Also it was very nice to discuss our OpenVZ server farm at work with Kir's Know How. Quote "Kir: Uhh, you perl scripts are really hardcoded" - :o)
I hope we will see us before the next LinuxTag next year. As we spoke about we decide to help the project by doing support on the forum/blog and maybe some wiki stuff (system use case).
For all readers we took some pictures from the booth and us. You can find them on our blog page systec.blogsite.org.
I am almost ready for the LinuxTag, my flight from Moscow to Berlin is tomorrow mid-day. I have prepared booklets, even in German (thanks to Mario and Bernhard, OpenVZ users from Austria who will also help me with the booth). And I will even have a monitor to demo Overo Gumstix running Linux (thanks to Björn from XtreemFS). So if you are visiting LinuxTag this year, come to say hello!
If you happen to be on a different continent, North America, then I welcome you to visit LinuxSymposium. This is a quite a big annual event, and unlike LinuxWorld (which is now called OpenSourceWorld) they haven't changed their name for 10 years (well, hmm, actually they dropped the Ottawa prefix since this year it will be held in Montreal -- but at least they left the Linux part, the one that is most important for me). For the LinuxSymposium I am preparing a tutorial and a BoF. So, again, come to say hello! :)
I have just got my passport back from the German embassy today, with a shiny new Schengen visa and booked tickets to Berlin. Yes, this is for LinuxTag event which will take place in Berlin, Germany, from 24th to 27th of June. OpenVZ will have a booth on the show.
Are there any OpenVZ users living not too far from Berlin* who can help me with the booth (i.e. be a booth star together with me)? Please contact me by leaving a comment here or email to kir at openvz dot org, I need your help.
* from my perspective every German city is not too far from Berlin :) but YMMV.
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.
Better late than never, these are my impressions about SCALE and Florida Linux Show we (me and my colleague, an OpenVZ kernel developer Andrey Mirkin) went to in February.
Back in 2006 I was a speaker at SCALE4x, so I can compare and say SCALE is getting bigger and better! This time it was three days, with three parallel conference tracks and about 80 booths, one of which was OpenVZ.
The booth traffic was moderate to high, we were busy explaining OpenVZ to people, distributing booklets and live CDs, and burning more CDs. For the first time we used lightscribe to have a nice image on CDs, and I can say it works pretty well, but requires about 15 minutes for the image to be "scribed" (and about the same time for the actual data).
Also we did a talk on live migration which was quite technical and interesting. Talk was mostly delivered by Andrey, and this is the first time he did a talk in English. I hope that SCALE people will upload the audio/video from the talk -- it should be interesting enough. Unfortunately we were not able to listen to any other talks -- this is the price for having own booth.
Last day of the show was Sunday, and overnight we flew to another coast, to deliver the OpenVZ talk to participants of the Florida Linux Show. FLS is (I hope yet) much smaller than SCALE, and it is one day only, but the organisation is about the same: the expo floor and the conference tracks. My talk was attended by about 50 people, of which about 15 were asking good questions.
I managed to show the live migration of a container running pacman xscreensaver, but it was interrrupted when I raised a hand with the second notebook to show it -- apparently both the power supply and the battery got disconnected so it suddenly switched off. I continued with the slides while Andrey fixed the notebook, and then I showed the demo (without touching the second notebook this time). This "demo effect" happens from time to time, and the more people are attending the more the probability that it will happen. Anyway, all's well that ends well.
In the evening we had a dinner with some FLS participants, including Jon "maddog" Hall who was the keynote speaker, and Dan Trevino, a member of local Ubuntu community who helps us with OpenVZ/Ubuntu integration.
Next day we were in New York and met with Vasily Tarasov, our colleague who is now taking the post graduate courses in Stony Brook University. He is working on various kernel-related projects and maybe will help us a bit with OpenVZ.
Back in July, me and a couple of colleagues (Pavel Emelianov and Denis Lunev, both from the OpenVZ kernel team) were in Canada for the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
OLS is a pretty big event and probably the biggest conference that I've seen. Unlike all the previous years, this time it was detached from the Linux Kernel Summit (that will be in Cambridge, U.K. next week). Being detached seemed to have little impact on the event -- it is still large and somewhat kernel-oriented. The facilities for talks and BoFs included one big and five smaller rooms , all named after different species of penguins (the big one is of course named Emperor).
We also had our talk there, presented by Pavel and covering some non-trivial aspects of our resource management solution: the beancounters, which is part of OpenVZ kernel. The paper (PDF, 156K, 9 pages) and the slides (ODP, 89K or PPT, 474K) are available. In short, this is what he was talking about:
Current Linux accounting and limiting mechanisms (setrlimit() and some global stats counters) are not enough as they do not provide any task group-based counters and limits. OpenVZ's beancounters address this issue, implementing per-group accounting and limiting for about 20 different properties, like kernel memory, user space memory, physical memory, network buffers etc. Some specific implementation details (like shared RSS accounting, kernel slab accounting etc) are described.
It's good to see the high level of interest to containers this year. As in any conference, though, a lot of networking is done away from the formal proceedings. For example, we (I mean everybody who's interested in containers) all had a breakfast in nearby Starbucks to discuss containers, resource management, network virtualization and other subtle aspects of what we do. About half of the famous Blackthorn Party for us was devoted to the same discussions (while the other half is surely about the beer).
It was a successful event, and I'm looking forward to take part in the next Blackthorn Party Linux Symposium in Ottawa.
I tried it and was able to migrate a CentOS 7 container... but the Fedora 22 one seems to be stuck in the "started" phase. It creates a /vz/private/{ctid} dir on the destination host (with the same…
The fall semester is just around the corner... so it is impossible for me to break away for a trip to Seattle. I hope one or more of you guys can blog so I can attend vicariously.
Comments
Do you still stand by your opinions above now in 2016?…