Monthly Archives: January 2009

KDE 4.2 on Gentoo

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KDE 4.2 is out officially.  The ebuilds for Gentoo have been ready for a while.  This is a truly fantastic release.  If you’ve ever made an opinion about KDE in the past, I encourage you to give it another go.

My beta1 review back in December sums up most of my thoughts on the release.  There isn’t anything significantly changed since, just lots of polish and bug fixing.  Everything has been stable and functional since I’ve been using it in the RC phase.   This is a worthy opponent to KDE 3.5, GNOME, Windows and OS X.

Thanks again to the Gentoo KDE team.  The ebuilds are in great shape!

One Small Step for QT, One Giant Leap for Free Software

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QT Software, under the graces of Nokia, has released the superb QT cross-platform toolkit under the LGPL.

This. is. HUGE.

For the libre software purist, this still benefits you, if indirectly.  Companies that make changes to the toolkit must still submit patches.  More influential, GPL incompatible software may now readily use QT for free.  This will likely foster more QT centric developers, boost adoption of the underlying stack (Linux, etc), and lower the barrier for vendors to release cross-platform tools.

From a Nokia business perspective, it makes perfect sense and makes the whole thing that much more beautiful.  “QT Everywhere” is really a possibility now.  And, it’s beneficial to Nokia as well as the ecosystem they are enriching.  The more QT developers, the bigger the talent pool for Nokia software.  The more contributors, the better the toolkit.  Win.  A small company like Trolltech could not afford to do this, but to a big dog like Nokia, the revenue from commercial licensing is insignificant and unimportant compared to device sales.

I know the company I work for, Analog Rails, will be able to take advantage of the license switch.  Being previous commercial QT customers, it was expensive to juggle around machines to maintain compliance.  For a companies like VMWare that deploy cross-platform software and maintain their own cross-platform extensions, this surely must be compelling.  I say, the more the merrier!

What a great day for free software, computing, and life in general :-) .

Ars Technica has outstanding coverage of the news: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

Welcome back, Palm! The New Palm Pre

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I’ve always been a fan of Palm hardware, and even had a soft spot for PalmOS until it was left to rot for so long.

Indeed, my Palm 800w is a fine piece of hardware even though it was quickly eclipsed by the Treo Pro, but Windows Mobile has been really painful. It is slow, bloated, and crashes frequently. It has zero intuition and single-handed operation is out of the question. Worst of all, there seems to be a lack of useful or quality apps that were abundant in PalmOS.   I am a bit mad that I paid $500 for such a lemon.

Enter the Pre, which looks like just the thing to get me back on board with Palm and get them back in the game.

The hardware design looks beautiful, giving a large screen but keeping the tactile and speed of a keyboard (this is the iPhone’s biggest weak spot IMHO).  It looks like typical form factor for this style of phone, similar to the new Blackberry, so nothing earth shattering there, but the OS looks top notch and is based on Linux.  I think if Palm is able to deliver, they will once again be competitive, and they will keep me as a customer.

Take a look at these links for a nice report:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090108-palm-launches-new-handset-pre-operating-system-at-ces.html
http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html

I dream of pervasive virtualization…

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I dream of a day where virtualization is pervasive.

Instead of thinking about services in terms of servers, CPUs or directly mapped resources, I should be able to to add virtual machines in terms of guaranteed throughput rate over a whole grid.  Scaling out should be as easy as adding a blade or racking another server.

At the low level, I should have the option of running N+N redundancy.  That is, the VM should run in lockstep across multiple machines – so if it is running on 2 vcpus, 4 in total would be used.  This would allow for any node to fail.  And the VM should be an aggregate of the low level hardware – e.g. a VM grid across 4 8-core servers should scale near-linearly when a single OS instance is running 32 processes.

Current solutions only attempt to do some of the tasks above, and most fail miserably.  IBM mainframes have been doing it for ages.

If I had the time, I know I could build software to do this better than anyone else.  All the puzzle pieces are there, especially the tough ones like hypervisors and Infiniband.  This could have been done at least 3 years ago.  I bet it will take the industry 3-4 years yet to get anywhere close.

This is a real virtual datacenter.

Xen 3.3 in RHEL/CentOS 5 and more Link Aggregation Fun

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RHEL 5 includes the now ancient Xen 3.0 hypervisior.  A lot has been improved since then, especially in the current 3.3 release.  Additionally, RedHat now owns the company behind KVM, so it is unlikely they will spend much time backporting Xen stuff for RHEL 5.3 or the likes.

Why Xen?

Xen is a proven hypervisor.  It works well on lots of hardware, including servers without hardware virtualization and older 64-bit Opterons that wont run 64-bit guests in the likes of VMWare.  Since the OS is usually paravirtualized, performance is top notch.  By making an OS aware of the environment it is running in, you can optimize it for virtualization.  KVM is playing catchup here, realizing that paravirtualization is still ideal for many things.

How..

Okay, so we are using or want to use Xen. Others have already built the packages we need, thankfully!

Head over to http://www.gitco.de/repo/ and grab the repo for your arch.  (Most likely wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/CentOS5-GITCO_x86_64.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ for the uninitiated).

If you already have Xen installed, you may need to remove and readd it.

yum groupremove Virtualization
yum groupinstall Virtualization

You’ll also get some updated tools like Virtual Machine Monitor 0.6.0 that make it easier to install newer guests such as Fedora 10 or Ubuntu.  Sweet!

Double check /etc/sysconfig/kernel.  It should be set to kernel-xen.  Likewise, check /boot/grub.conf and make sure that the Xen kernel is the default if the aforementioned was not done beforehand.

Reboot!

Xen 3.3 and Link Bonding

See my previous post for general information, but it gets harder.

This one is a nightmare.  In my previous post, I detailed how to get Xen to work with link aggregation with Xen 3.0.  Well, it doesn’t work in 3.3.  Xen decides that it still owns eth0 and completely destroys your bond0 setup.

Like these people, I’ve come to the conclusion that the integrated network scripts suck.  This is alarming since you’d think link bonded setups would be the norm for Xen setups.

The quick fix is to let the OS handle networking.  We do that like so: add a br0 interface and tell the bond to bridge with it.

File /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0

DEVICE=br0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=10.0.6.201
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.0.6.1
NO_ALIASROUTING=yes
TYPE=Bridge

Then, edit your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 and add “BRIDGE=br0″ and comment out any IP related information (since you are now defining that in the bridge.  Head over to /etc/sysctl.conf and add:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

Now, edit your Xen VMs in /etc/xen/ or /etc/xen/auto and change xenbr0 to br0:

vif = [ ‘mac=ee:cc:aa:88:66:44, bridge=br0′, ]

Okay, now disable the Xen networking garbage.  Open /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp and comment out anything  that looks like (network-script ….).

Almost done, but wait!  RHEL 5.2 has a bug that prevents the bridge coming up on a bonded interface.  Hopefully this will make the 5.3 cut or be pushed to 5.2, but until then go here.  Download the new patch into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and run patch -p0 < ifup-eth.patch for instance.

Finish

Reboot.  You now have Xen 3.3 goodness on a big Ethernet channel!  Post a comment if you have any trouble or questions.