gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

ifconfig, netstat, and route were apparently deprecated on Linux because they don’t support all the Linux kernel’s fancy networking features. The cool new stuff is called iproute2 and includes some obscure ip command. I realized that after reading a post on Martin’s blog a few days ago.

If you think iproute2 is new, you’re mistaken. It was actually released over 10 years ago, I just happened to not notice that until now. Maybe it’s time to move to BSD like all the other old people and leave Linux to the kids.

Recently I came across a fairly interesting paper about Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications written by two Googlers, Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek. (Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2010)

Most of the stuff was interesting, but not applicable to what most people will have to work with, unless you try to work with a massive dataset… like… let’s say building an index of everything on the web.

One of the most interesting parts for me was the following paragraph:

Our experience with thread-per-request was, on the whole, positive: application code is simple, we achieve good utilization on many-core machines, and crash debugging is simplified by meaningful and complete stack traces. We encountered fewer race conditions in application code than we feared. The biggest drawbacks of the approach were scalability issues in the Linux kernel and Google infrastructure related to high thread counts. Our in-house kernel development team was able to deploy fixes to address
the kernel issues.

Broadcom released open source drivers for their 802.11n chipsets BCM4313, BCM43224, and BCM43225.

This will probably take a few months to really become useful, after it’s included in various distributions, but it’s a huge step for Broadcom wireless chipset support on Linux.

nmon is now available on sourceforge. It has been released under the GPL and there is already a nmon debian package.

The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year.

I didn’t see that coming.

Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux device drivers – covered by the GPL.

“The Linux device drivers we are releasing are designed so Linux can run in enlightened mode, giving it the same optimized synthetic devices as a Windows virtual machine running on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. We worked very closely with the Hyper-V team at Microsoft to make that happen.”

As of late I think someone in Redmond is trying to drive RMS crazy and it looks like they’re doing a good job ;-)

Seriously though, this is good because it is in Microsoft’s best interest – which should mean that the drivers actually work well in real-world applications – and it makes it easy for Microsoft’s clients to run Linux applications on Windows without having to port everything to Windows.

Update 7/21: Please also refer to Greg Kroah-Hartmann’s blog post and the lkml post.

My final open Debian bug – #159327 – has been closed.

Not that I know too much about payment processing at PayPal, but each time I read a story like this that says “we’re replacing System i/p/z with System x boxes and it’s so much cheaper” I always wonder two things.

1) As a payments company do you really want to “follow the Linux kernel development process” just to process a few transactions per second? Is it really a prerequisite to have people that know the kernel? A moment ago we were still talking about a payment system, not a device driver.

2) Does it sound sensible to run thousands of servers and maintain the staff and software to actually do it? – I have to say that I always found it interesting to see how much workload large systems can process and how few people you need to do it.

The Debian project confirmed that Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 ’etch’ will be released in December 2006. (Yes guys, that means this year :) ) – There will even be a bug squashing party in Vienna on September 8th – 10th. [via esa]

What we all knew and had already seen years ago has now been certified. So for whoever needs that paper, Debian is now certified as carrier-grade.