Michael Dolan Dot Com

Archive for the 'Real-time' Category

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Shameless Analyst Report Plug: “IBM & Linux – 9 Years Later”

A colleague sent me a link to this analyst paper today that takes a look at whether IBM has made good on the Linux promises it made back in 1999. I’m obviously biased, but I’m interested in hearing if anyone has thoughts on this topic.

Here’s the report: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/linux/pdfs/GCG_IBM_and_Linux-9_years_later.pdf

The opening teaser:

In 1999, IBM issued a series of announcements fully committing the company to supporting Linux. IBM vowed to Linux-enable all of their hardware platforms, including their non-x86 based mainframe, mini, and RISC-based systems. They also promised to release Linux versions of their software products and develop
Linux-centric service practices. Moreover, they pledged significant resources to the Linux community with the goal of advancing Linux and open source technology.

So, nine years later, did IBM deliver on these promises? Was their commitment to Linux genuine or just lip service? This report examines IBM’s current Linux products, services, and community support in light of the promises they made in 1999…

While I think it’s obvious IBM has been a huge investor in the Linux community, one thing that I noticed reading the report is just how much IBM is actually different from other community members. There are some noticeable differences in the investments and approach to supporting the Linux platform and community. I often forget to just take in all the Linux technologies IBM has been heavily involved in from Xen, KVM and libvirt to filesystems, to systemtap, kprobes and then there’s RAS, scalability and performance enhancements.

Another interesting thought to reflect on is just how important it has been that there are multiple investors in this field. If this report captures just what IBM did, think of the industry combined. IBM couldn’t have done anything this big with Linux if it weren’t for co-creating with a community of enthusiasts, researchers, governments, Intel, AMD, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle and thousands more. What would the report look like if you compiled all the investments and work the entire community leveraged across the industry. Linux is “bigger than huge” when you stop to think about it. This is also why I’ve said for a couple years now when you extend the investment model 3 to 5 years into the future, Sun and its anti-Linux,  Solaris push against the tide of the industry loses in the end. I think we’re starting to witness that now. Sure, OpenSolaris is a great idea… it’s just 9 years late and it’s too late to matter now.

I’m interested in outside perspectives too - where do you think IBM stands? Has the community development and investment model worked? Where will this lead in the future and what will be the next evolution of the model? Red Hat seems to think the model will evolve to include increased customer co-creation - I tend to agree. Why? Because the incentive model to invest aligns very well - and when you have alignment, it almost naturally will happen.

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

What is real time Linux worth to you?

Justifying investments in a real time Linux platform is perhaps too easy given a new report from Tabb Group (URLs below). Purists may initially point out that the report is more focused on speed of execution which real time is not necessarily intended to provide. I’ll counter that argument right now by pointing out that most real time implementations do increase speed while still providing the benefit of determinism that real time is intended to offer. Besides, how can you ensure speedy execution across thousands of transactions if you don’t have a deterministic platform? Even the fastest drag race cars slow down eventually…

Add in real time Java and you have a fully deterministic stack.

16 percent of all U.S. institutional equity commissions are exposed to latency risk, totaling $2 billion, according to a new report from the TABB Group.

http://www.tabbgroup.com/PublicationDetail.aspx?PublicationID=346

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/feed/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400864&cid=RSSfeed_WST_All

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Linux continues to evolve adding specialized purpose function into a general purpose OS

The great thing about Linux is that it’s a general purpose operating system that can be molded into a platform for anything from mobile devices, to printer embedded OS functionality to supercomputer and mainframes. Linux can also bring in certain features that may not apply to everyone but which cater to users with very specific needs. Like it or not as a mainstream security feature, SELinux has come quite far as evidenced in the latest RHEL5. SELinux also caters well to specific users with high security requirements. For those users, SELinux is probably easier to use than their other options and it is tailored to the needs they have.

Linux is now heading into another direction focusing on the specific needs for users with very low latency and determinism requirements. This can apply to anything from weapons systems for military applications, to Wall Street customers sell side trading systems, and even to SMS messaging in the telecommunications industry.

And so we’re beginning to see great strides shaping Linux for the needs of these user segments that demand low latency and determinism in both their operating system and applications. Platforms like IBM’s WebSphere Real Time and even Sun’s real time Java are currently running (or in Sun’s case, being ported to run) on a real time Linux operating system. With a real time Java machine, suddenly Java applications can inherit the benefits of a real time system. And so antiquated real time languages are suddenly… antiquated officially because a real time Linux and Java solution can marry a general purpose OS with a general purpose programming language for the best of both worlds. IBM has made great gains in the technology adding both a real time Java garbage collector and Ahead-of-Time compilation to make this a great solution compelling enough for the US Navy’s mission critical weapons systems.

Recently Novell has announced their SLERT product updates with great monitoring tools from Concurrent bundled in (and tighter integration of the kernel community real time patches - now a community standard?). I expect we’ll also soon hear more about Red Hat’s real time plans as well so stay tuned…

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Linux is unstoppable: the contributor base is still growing.

Interesting article over at LinuxWorld.com:

A graph of all the developers involved in the upcoming 2.6.22 release, and the relationships of who reviewed whose patches, extends to a 40-foot-long printout with names in tiny type. The graph is on display at the Ottawa event.

The new “mess” results in innovative new features getting integrated into Linux distributions much more quickly, says Jonathan Corbet, author of the camera driver for One Laptop Per Child and another co-author of Linux Device Drivers. Previously, when developers maintained both “stable” and “development” kernels, it could have been two to three years before a feature made it from development to mainstream users.

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Realtime Linux kernel LiveCD

Burn, test, fall in love with determinism.

http://www.osadl.org/projects-live-cd.0.html

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Linux 2.6.21 kernel arrives

As SVN reports, Linus has signed off on 2.6.21 with new innovative features to help with real-time, virtualization, and power usage (yes, a greener Linux). Two big features arrive with 2.6.21.

First, there’s clockevents:

The clockevents feature provides a uniform interface and a device API for a computer’s various timekeeping and scheduling devices. With this, developers don’t need to delve down to the hardware level to work with a computer’s timing mechanisms, making it much easier to program extremely accurate timekeeping.

Then there’s dynticks (looks like we’re getting closer to a mainframe virtualization eh?):

dynticks, saves power by shutting down the system clock more completely during periods of idleness. With earlier kernels, the system clock keeps “ticking” the timer interrupt even when the system has gone idle, at a rate of 1,000 ticks per second, or 1Hz. That wastes a lot of Watts when the CPU is doing nothing but virtually twiddling its thumbs waiting for another job. With Dynticks, the timer interrupt is turned almost off and the CPU waits for a real interrupt to come from a program, network interface, or the like. By idling your processor, you save energy — and on a laptop, that’s not a small matter.

Dynticks is one feature I’m thinking of compiling a new kernel to get… while writing this, I see that Gentoo sources already has an x86 kernel source for 2.6.21 ready to go :-)

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

eWeek: Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology

Linux with realtime extensions is going to be quite popular once companies realize all the benefits never before achievable (cost effectively). IBM and Red Hat have been aggressively developing real time extensions and if you’re in telco, financial or federal sectors, you should definitely take a look for any applications that require or desire guaranteed transaction determinism.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2121087,00.asp

“The real-time upstream kernel work is a mainstream community initiative and is all about determinism and latency, about being able to have guarantees that transactions will complete within finite periods of time and that the highest priority processes and applications will be able to run without being pre-empted by lower priority applications or low level system services.”

– Tim Burke, Red Hat