LTC bulletin: January 31, 2002

News in brief from IBM's Linux Technology Center

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 a free Linux test drive for the IBM eServer iSeries; several new releases from Channel Bonding, JFS, and the LSB test suites; patches from the internationalization team, Samba, SCTP, and Kernel Crash Dumps; as well as several new white papers by LTC members presented at the January 2002 LinuxWorld Expo.

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.

Channel Bonding
The Linux Channel Bonding project released new stable code for the 2.4.17 kernel, which was made available in early January. The major change to the new code is that the original slave flags will be restored at release time. The work was done by Chad Tindel, a primary contributor to the project.

The Channel Bonding project works on methods to join multiple networks on Linux into a single logical network with higher bandwidth. The project team works with the Beowulf Ethernet Channel Bonding project, where bonding work began. An independent listing of the benchmarks of a sample of inter-processor speeds with and without channel bonding has been measured using the systest utility.

Dynamic Probes
Dynamic Probes version 3.3.0 was released in mid-December, which upgraded to kernel version 2.4.16 and made a few other minor changes. The changelog is available from the project site on developerWorks.

Dynamic Probes, or DProbes, is a debugging facility designed to work under extreme or inaccessible conditions. It gathers diagnostic information by dynamically firing probes into executing code modules, relying on user written probe-handlers (programs written in assembly-like code based on Reversed Polish Notation).

Internationalization patches (I18N)
Three new internationalization patches by Mitsuru Chinen for GNU textutils, diffutils, and binutils and util-linux are available, as well as one updated patch. The textutils patch changes the cut, expand, fold, join, pr, sort, unexpand, uniq, and wc commands to support multi-byte character sets, and is currently available only through the LTC, as are the diffutils patch and binutils patch patch, which respectively change the diff commands to support multibyte character sets, and the nm commands to sort the symbol name, depending on the sorting order of the current locale, as Chinen explains. The util-linux patch, which changes cal commands to support multibyte character sets, has been submitted to the util-linux maintainer.

The Linux Internationalization initiative, known as Li18nux or I18N, is run by the Free Standards Group. They are working on developing internationalization specifications for Linux and related applications, and made a conformance test suite available in August of 2000. Many contributors from the LTC are working on patches to increase Linux conformance to these standards.

Linux on iSeries test drive
The Linux on iSeries test drive was made available in mid-December. The program provides free remote shared access to an iSeries server running Linux on either a SuSE or TurboLinux distribution and 170 MB of user space.

The IBM eServer iSeries is a set of enterprise servers designed for e-business solutions. Although Linux distributions for the iSeries are yet to be made available, you can run Linux on the iSeries unsupported. Note that this requires the next version of OS/400, which is still in beta testing.

JFS
JFS has released versions 1.0.11 and 1.0.12, marking the fiftieth release of the Enterprise Journaled File System port to Linux. The original release was made available in December of 2000. This release has the temporary restriction that the block size must be 4 K, which MKFS.jfs defaults to. No changes were made to the utilities in this most recent drop, but a few functions and fixes were added to the new JFS, which are detailed at the end of the changelog.

The Journaled File System technology from IBM, currently used in its enterprise servers, provides a log-based, byte-level file system designed for high-throughput server environments.

Linux for S/390
A Red Hat Linux 7.2 release is available for the Linux for S/390 and zSeries servers. The core components of the system are the 2.4.9 kernel, 31 bit, gcc 2.95.3, glibc 2.2.4, ext3 journaling file system and a few S/390-specific tools and utilities.

Linux for S/390 is a port of Linux to the S/390 architecture. It is a pure Linux from a user point of view. It supports the S/390 processor architecture and some devices that are specific to S/390 environments. The IBM eServer zSeries for Linux is the world's first dedicated Linux mainframe server.

Linux Kernel Crash Dump patch
A Linux Kernel Crash Dump patch for a multiple CPU state view and register display was released in mid-December by Vamsi Krishnu. The patch has been committed in the LKCD project CVS tree.

The LKCD is developing methods to detect, save, and examine Linux system crashes, in a contribution to the ongoing effort to increase Linux stability.

Linux Kernel SCTP
Patches for the Linux Kernel Stream Control Transmission Protocol are now being tracked through an LTC patch page. The four most recent patches, all of which have either been committed to the CVS or submitted to the LKSCTP, include a patch to reduce unwarranted SACK traffic, a test case patch for listen() and a support patch, and a patch for assoc-id. Functional details for all of these patches, as well as the patches themselves, are available through the LTC patch page.

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a multi-homed, multi-streamed transport protocol. Two SCTP mailing lists are available through the SCTP developers forum. The most recent LKSCTP release, from October of 2001, is version 2.4.1-0.3.2 and includes support for Multi-homing failover and rwnd processing.

Linux Scalability Project
The Linux Scalability Project has published an lse-union patch for the 2.4.13 kernel. "The patch provides an idea of what scalability gains are possible today," says John Stultz, the patch author. As of the end of November, the first ten patches have been merged.

The Linux Scalability Project has also ported a multi-queue scheduler patch to the 2.5.0 kernel, released a scalable counters patch against the 2.4.14 kernel, a read-copy update patch against the 2.4.10 kernel, and a PAGE_SIZE based raw I/O patch.

The Linux Scalability Project is an investigation into Linux 2.4 SMP scalability, using Netbench® as a workload with Samba.

LSB
The Linux Standards Base test suites 1.1 were released in early January, and the 1.1 specification is ready for public review.

The LSB is a family of specifications defining a binary system interface for compiled applications in order to ensure a uniform industry-standard environment. The specification consists of a generic LSB and an architecture-specific LSB. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) works to advance these standards among Linux distributions so that all Linux software can run on compliant systems. The LSB is also involved in development efforts and recruits vendors to the Linux platform.

Linux Test Project
The Linux Test Project has released version 20020108 and posted a paper on how to run the LTP test suite including installation notes and a "quick start cheat sheet". Release notes for the new version are available through the project site on SourceForge.

"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."

Miscellaneous patches by LTC members
A Linux kernel patch for disk I/O statistics by Mingming cao has been submitted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "This patch," according to Mingming, "dynamically allocates the data buffers for the disk statistics, and extends the gathering of disk statistics to include major numbers greater than 15."

NUMA-Q
A project devoted to running Linux on NUMA-Q has been added to the list of projects hosted by the LTC. "The machines will boot and run Linux, but the OS is unaware that the hardware is a NUMA architecture, not SMP," according to Martin Bligh, the project leader. The NUMA-Q is a proprietary IBM enterprise server, and no commercial support for running Linux on NUMA-Q is currently available.

openCryptoki
The openCryptoki project has released version 1.3.0 of their Cryptographic Accelerator and Coprocessor drivers.

openCryptoki is the operating system implementation of PKCS#11, V2.0. It provides a generalized abstraction for interface with cryptographic hardware and supports both the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor and the IBM eServer Cryptographic Accelerator.

OpenLDAP
The OpenLDAP project has released version 2.0.19. Version 2.0 was released at the end of August in 2000 and included LAPv3, an enhanced stand-alone server and improved platform/subsystem detection. 2.0.19 is a minor release with functional enhancements described on the project Web page.

OpenLDAP is an implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which defines protocols for updating and searching directories running over TCP/IP. It was designed by the Internet Engineering Taskforce to encourage use of the standard X.500 directories from the International Telecommunications Union, covering electronic directory services.

OSCAR
The OSCAR clustering project has released version 1.2, beta 4. "The major feature of this release," notes the project team, "is the replacement of the installer (LUI) with the System Installation Suite(SIS)." LUI is a utility that installs workstations remotely over an ethernet network by providing tools to manage installation resources on the server. Read about the merger between LUI and the VA SystemImager to form SIS, the System Installation Suite.

PowerPC 64
PowerPC 64 has released drop 22 and now supports the 2.5.x kernel series. Drop 22 provides new IDE support and iSeries fixes.

The ppc64 port of the Linux kernel runs on both iSeries and pSeries boxes with 64 bit PowerPC processors.

Samba
Six new Samba patches by Jim McDonough have been released and committed in CVS. They include patches for an active directory build, windbind character separators, the domain retrieval status code, win2K restricted domain with windbind, net utility help, and lanman/ntlm hashed passwords ordering. Functional details for all of these patches, as well as the patches themselves, are available through the LTC patch page.

Software Testing Automation Framework
The LTC has added the new Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) project, which has released version 2.3. STAF 2.3 is the first openly available release from the project. The Linux and Win32 binaries are currently available, according to the project site on SourceForge, and the Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Irix binaries, as well as a source archive, will be available shortly.

The Software Testing Automation Framework is designed to improve the level of reuse and automation in test cases and test environments, notes the project team. "STAF externalizes its capabilities through services that provide a focused set of functionality, such as logging. It works in a peer environment, where machines may make requests of services on other machines." The latest release, STAF 2.3, is supported on Linux, AIX 4.3, Solaris 2.6, HP-UX 11, Iris, and Windows 95, 98, Millenium, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP.

Documentation from the LTC
Recent updates to the documentation (LDoc) page include a grammar and consistency update of the LSB spec with twelve update patches and four bugs resolved, an update to sections of the EVMS HOWTO, and submission of several new function definitions for the glibc manual.

Events
At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in January, Steve Best gave a presentation on the JFS file system; Boas Betzler gave a talk focusing on embedded Linux development some of the relevant work going on at IBM; and George Kraft, chairman of the LSB, presented a paper on "How to Build an LSB-Compliant Application."

White papers
Several new white papers covering security issues have been published by members of the LTC, among them "Security Requirements for the Deployment of the Linux Kernel in Enterprise Systems" and "Linux Security for the Enterprise: Executive Summary" by Trent Jaeger, David Safford, and Hubertus Franke, and "Securing Linux Servers for Service Providers" by Bill Hilf, Sr.

Resources

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.

Copyright 2002