OLS Day 4
H Peter Anvin starts of with a long history of IBM booting in order to get to Network booting. how we went from ROMs placed on network cards up till PXE
He explains how he went from SYSLINUX , to PXELINUX adding ISOLINUX etc ..
Next to him there was the another boot project , Net Boot Image Proposal originally from NetBSD which aimed at creating a ROM image which then became Etherboot wich just in 2008 became gPXE which is now aiming at full PXE support. Initially 2 different projects with a totally different approach.
However some NIC's were broken and PXELinux didn't solve those problems, but gPXE could solve these. So the PXELinux and gPXE folks met up. Which eventually lead to a joined effort. Syslinux will get a LUA scripting interface where you can boot a certain kernel based on hardware specification.
Next talk was David Lutterkort talk about Augeas .. luckily he didn't spoil it yet over dinner yesterday ;_) Very interresting stuff .. surely something that's on my todolist.
Next was a talk on Vesper . (Virtual Embraced Space Prober)
When Clustering Virtual Machines there are different possibilities, What does heartbeat do already to cluster virtual machines Heartbeat just uses a VM as a resource. A heartbeat is to "slow" to monitor it's actual resources ..
Their solution is to probe the virtual machine , event driven , therefore immediate failure detection is possible.
It will also give you an alternative to debug the failure better.
Vesper is a framework to handle Kprobes in a virtual environment.
Sungho Kim pointed us to the CIMHA project which is aimed to create an integrated suite to provision and manage HA clusters in virtual environment. It will also constantly analyze kernel/hardware health of cluster nodes by using VESPER. Not sure if I`ll put that on my todolist however
What is Bringup you'd ask , according to Tim Hockin it is the process of making a new piece of hardware boot up YOUR os.
He also told us about Drummonds law ..which learns us that When you ship to a customer some thing will fail and When you start debugging it goes away ..
To circumvent a lot problems they have been developing a set of tools starting off with SGABios and iotools and then goes on to show how he digs into the cpu and pci information using their new ppfs
His project is PrettyPrint
Then off to the closing session of this last Ottawa Linux Symposium, this will be the last OLS for a while as they are tearing down the Conference center.. co the Linux Symposium will move to Montreal next year..
We're off to the Black Thorn Cafe for the final closing event now