News in brief from IBM's Linux Technology Center

LTC bulletin: January 23, 2002

Maya Stodte (mstodte@yahoo.com)
Technology journalist

January 2002

Our biweekly news in brief from the Linux Technology Center -- where all the Linux-related technologies inside IBM are tracked -- includes Linux probes module support (phase one) from the DPCL project, several substantial new releases from EVMS and Event logging, among others, and the "fastest, most compliant, most compatible ever" NGPT release. You'll also find two new Samba patches, some miscellaneous patches, and an update on High Availability Linux heartbeat.

The updates in this bulletin are arranged alphabetically by project. To find out more about any of these projects and others, visit the Linux Technology Center.

Dynamic Probe Class Library
Phase one of the Linux probes module support has been released by the Dynamic Probe Class Library project, using the same DPCL API as the AIX implementation. Because this is the initial implementation, it is incomplete and not yet fully functional. The three main areas to be completed are the ability to unload probe modules, logic concerning the Linux BPatch, and changes to the original restrictions on the BPatch code. Progress on completing the module is on the DPCL project site.

"Dynamic Probe Class Library (DPCL)," explains the team, "is an object-based C++ class library that provides the necessary infrastructure to build parallel and serial tools through dynamic instrumentation. DPCL takes the basic components needed by tool developers and encapsulates them into C++ classes. Each class provides the member functions necessary to interact and dynamically instrument a running application with software patches called probes. Dynamic instrumentation provides the flexibility for tools to insert probes into applications as the application is running and only where it is needed."

EVMS
The EVMS project has released a new packaged version, 0.2.4. There have been quite a few new changes and bug fixes in this release -- see the changelog on the project's SourceForge site. Changes were made to the core engine, the GUI, the command line, and several plug-ins; and other features have been added. Initial support for the 2.5 kernel has also been made available.

The Enterprise Volume Management System does logical volume management with plug-in model architecture in order to maximize extensibility and flexibility.

Event Logging
Event Logging for the Enterprise now supports Linux S/390 and the zSeries in its latest release, version 1.1.1-2. The 1.1.1 release, which came out in late November and was covered in the previous LTC bulletin, has several bug fixes and quite a few new features and enhancements, among them a new library and a new display of events logged on the console.

The Linux Event Logging for Enterprise-Class Systems logs events and informational messages from kernel subsystems and system applications. The previously used printk/klog (for logging kernel events) and syslog (for logging non-kernel events) record events as text-only, have a limited user interface and set of event providers and notification capabilities, and log file sizes and the age of the events they record. With this in mind, the Device Driver Event Logging project aims, without affecting calls to printk/klog and syslog, to provide a system-wide log with event records of fixed structure that represent attributes of the event record and a variable-length data buffer containing the event data (text or binary).

High Availability Linux
The High Availability Linux project has also had a few updates since the last bulletin. There are now hundreds of High Availability Linux machines functioning around the globe. And MSC Linux has been added to the list of distributions that ship heartbeat. For more information, read the article on Non-stop Authentication with Linux Clusters by Jay D. Allen and Cliff White, of the IBM Linux Competency Center.

"Heartbeats" are the code for Linux High Availability. Currently hundreds of High Availability Linux machines are up and running, and the project team is beginning a close collaboration with the Linux Virtual Server. Heartbeat now ships as part of SuSE Linux, Conectiva Linux, Mandrake Linux, and MSC Linux. Mission Critical Linux is also building one of their products on it, as is VA Linux with their Ultra Monkey.

Linux Accessibility
The Linux Accessibility site at the LTC has updated its list of contributions. The Emacspeak Installation HOWTO has been released to the LDP; and approval for console508.p, which provides volume, font, color and tone alarm control, has been received and submitted to the Blinux community.

The IBM Linux Accessibility Team contributes to the open source community's accessibility efforts in order to help accelerate Linux development.

LinuxPPC64
LinuxPPC64 has released drop 20 and 21, which require the Linux 2.4.13 kernel. The fixes and functions, which are the result of a lot of continuous hard work, include a new iCom device driver and time fixes. A changelog is available from PenguinPPC64.org.

Work on the Linux port of the PowerPC 64 began in the middle of last year, and was running 32-bit applications by January of 2001. The source was released in June of 2001, and the team is hoping for inclusion in Linux distributions in the near future.

Linux Test Project
The Linux Test Project has released LTP version 20011206, as well as the Database Opensource Test Suite (DOTS) version 1.0. A changelog for the new LTP test suite is available form the project's site on SourceForge.

The DOTS test cases are "designed for the purpose of stress testing database server systems in order to measure database server performance and reliability," according to the team. In addition to stress testing, basic cases test for complete JDBC API coverage, and advanced cases model real-world business applications. The suite consists of a total of ten Java tests, supported by DB2, Oracle, and Sybase.

"The Linux Test Project is a group aimed at testing and improving Linux," notes the team. "The goal of the LTP is to deliver a suite of automated testing tools for Linux as well as publishing the results of tests we run." The latest package from the LTP is version 20010801. The changelog indicates that "there are several minor bug fixes and enhancements to this release as well as some new tests. New tests include an ipc semaphores test, an nfsstat test, a large file test, a filesystem permissions test, and several memory stress tests."

Miscellaneous patches
Following are miscellaneous patches produced by members of the LTC, beginning with the most recent.

R Sreelatha has written a new Linux kernel patch to restore the number of recursive symlinks back to the pre-2.4.12 value of 8. The patch has been submitted to the Linux Kernel mailing list.
Martin J. Bligh wrote a patch to enable PCI support on multi-quad NUMA-Q systems, which has been submitted for inclusion in Linux 2.4.X.
Martin also wrote a printk buffer size patch that has been included in the main kernel as of 2.4.16. The patch is "for larger machines," Martin notes. "16K isn't big enough to hold all the boot messages, which means some of the earlier boot messages don't make it to the log files."

NGPT
The Next Generation POSIX Threads project has released NGPT 1.1.1, the "fastest, most compliant, most compatible ever." The focus of the release was to improve POSIX compliance, improve performance, and improve the glibc/LinuxThread compatibility. Release notes and a changelog are available from the project site.

A patch has also been posted for NGPT 1.1.0 to fix the cancellation problem stated in the 1.1.0 release notes.

The Next Generation POSIX Threading project derives from the GNU Pth package. It aims to solve problems associated with the pthreads library on Linux.

Samba
Two new Samba patches by Jim McDonough have been released, one for winbind character separators and one to fix building of Active Directory support in CVS. Both have been committed in CVS.

System Configurator and System Installer
System Configurator has released version 1.0.1, and System Installer has released version 0.6. The System Configurator release made minor fixes to IA-64. The new System Installer release has several new features and fixes, among them support for multiple locations of System Imager binaries and minimal Debian package support. A changelog is available from the project's SourceForge site.

System Configurator works in tandem with System Installer and System Imager, which make up the System Installation Suite. SIS is the result of a recent merger between the LTC LUI project and SystemImager from VA Linux. Read more about the merger in the LTC Bulletin from June 19.

Resources

Read the previous LTC bulletins on developerWorks:
- December 12, 2001
- November 28, 2001
- November 15, 2001
- October 30, 2001
- August 30, 2001
- August 22, 2001
- July 31, 2001
- July 16, 2001
- June 19, 2001
- May 21, 2001
- May 7, 2001
- April 23, 2001
Visit the Linux Technology Center and take a look Behind the scenes at the LTC.
Browse the Linux Documentation Page.
Learn more about the projects and patches covered in this LTC bulletin:
- Dynamic Probe Class Library project (developerWorks)
- Enterprise Volume Management System project (SourceForge)
- Event Logging for the Enterprise project (SourceForge)
- High Availability Linux project (Linux-ha.org)
- Linux Accessibility project (developerWorks)
- LinuxPPC64 project (penguinppc64.org)
- Linux Test Project (SourceForge)
- Miscellaneous patches (developerWorks)
- Next Generation POSIX Threads project (developerWorks)
- Samba project (developerWorks)
- System Configurator, System Installer, System Imager and System Installation Suite projects (SourceForge)
Take our free JFS fundamentals tutorial.
Check out more Linux resources and more Open source resources on developerWorks.

About the author
Maya Stodte, previously a contributing writer and editor for developerWorks, is now working as a freelancer. She can be reached at mstodte@yahoo.com.