News in brief from IBM's Linux Technology Center

LTC bulletin: February 14, 2002

Maya Stodte (mstodte@yahoo.com)
Technology journalist

February 2002

Our biweekly news in brief from the Linux Technology Center -- where all the Linux-related technologies inside IBM are tracked -- includes a Hotplug PCI patch and ACPI Hotplug PCI driver, and nine new USB patches that are posted on the new LTC patch page. In addition, EVMS has a new package version of a beta release; a new Heartbeat has been released by High Availability Linux; a new JFS drop has been released; lots of new patches covering projects ranging from IPv6 to Samba have been released; and the 2.5.2 kernel has been released, with USB 2.0 support.

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.

Enterprise Volume Management Systems (EVMS)
In mid-January, the EVMS project made a package version 0.90 available as a beta release. Changes were made to the core engine, and to several plug-ins including AIX, LVM, and MD, the GUI, the text-mode interface, and the kernel. For details, see the changelog for this release on the project site on SourceForge.

In other news, EVMS recently released a new FAQ and a Debian package. The FAQ covers questions about segment hda 9, compatibility volume, and disk partitions with file systems. The Debian package, for the "unstable/SID" distribution, contains core infrastructure and some utilities; work is underway to provide the package for the "Woody" distribution.

EVMS does logical volume management with plug-in model architecture in order to improve extensibility and flexibility.

High Availability Linux
Version 0.4.9a of Heartbeat, code for High Availability Linux, was released by the High Availability Linux project in mid-January. Heartbeat is being called a "bleeding-edge version" of the 0.4.9 release, last updated in November of 2001. That version had several performance-related and support fixes, details for which are available in the changelog posted on the project site.

Currently over a dozen 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, and Mandrake Linux. Mission Critical Linux is also building one of its products on it, as is VA Linux with its Ultra Monkey. A complete guide to Linux High Availability and Heartbeat has been made available by Rudy Pawul.

Hotplug PCI
Hotplug PCI has announced its dietHotplug 0.4 and has released version 20020114. Neither release contains any functional changes. Two new PCI Hotplug patches have also been released. One patch by Greg Kroah-Hartman fixes two memory leaks in the driver: "one if registering a slot fails, and the other when the driver is unloaded from the kernel," Kroah-Hartman explains. The second patch supports new IBM motherboards. "This is a patch that contains a new PCI Hotplug controller driver that will work on upcoming IBM i386-based machines," according to the team that wrote it. "It is the first publicly released version, and still needs to undergo a lot of testing before it is submitted to the kernel tree."

"The PCI Hotplug driver for Linux is part of a project to add support for PCI Hotplug into the Linux kernel," notes the project team. "This project includes source for a driver (cpqphp.o) for the Compaq PCI Hotplug controller found in Compaq ProLiant and other servers. Also, there are GUI and command-line interfaces to PCI Hotplug. Using this software and a 2.4 Linux kernel, it is possible to add or remove most PCI adapters in a server with the supporting hardware."

Internationalization patches (I18N)
The Internationalization patch for GNU bash has been updated and submitted to the GNU bash maintainer. A new textutils patch is also available on the LTC patch page.

The Linux Internationalization initiative, otherwise 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.

IPv6 patch
The IPv6 patch has released version 20020121. See the changelog for details.

The USAGI (UniverSAl playGround for Ipv6) Linux development project works to deliver the IPv6 protocol stack to the Linux system. The project works in collaboration with the WIDE Project (Widely Integrated Distributed Environment), the KAME Project, and the TAHI Project.

JFS
JFS has released version 1.0.13; a few functions and fixes were added to the JFS and none to the utilities. This is the fifty-first release of the Enterprise Journaled File System port to Linux. A changelog is available from the project Web page and details all new functions and fixes made to both the JFS and the utilities since its inception.

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. Work is underway to complete the port to Linux.

Linux Scalability Effort
The Linux Scalability Effort has released a new tool, CpuMemSets, version 0.01. "CpuMemSets provides a low-level, general-purpose facility in the Linux kernel for use on large systems like NUMA, to specify on which processor a task may be scheduled, and on which node a memory region may acquire memory," according to the release notes for the new tool.

The Linux Scalability Effort is an investigation into Linux 2.4 SMP scalability, using Netbench® as a workload with Samba. The process scheduling and memory placement effort has made its design notes and more detailed information about the work on CpuMemSets available through the Scalability project site on SourceForge.

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

A new Linux kernel patch for concurrent SCSI queuing in Linux 2.4 by Jonathan Lahr has been submitted to the Linux Kernel mailing list.
A new Linux kernel patch by David Olien to fix semundo in the 2.4.x and 2.5.x series has been submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list.
An SCPI PCI Hotplug driver, also by Kroah-Hartman, has been submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list. "This is a patch against 2.5.2-pre11 that is the shell of the ACPI PCI Hotplug driver," Kroah-Hartman notes. "It is basically a skeleton pci_hotplug driver, with lots of sections for placing the ACPI support."

OpenLDAP
The OpenLDAP project has released versions 2.0.20 and 2.0.21, the latter of which has proven to be the most stable release of the protocol to date. Version 2.0 was released at the end of August in 2000 and included LDAPv3, an enhanced stand-alone server and improved platform/subsystem detection.

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 (IETF) to encourage use of the standard X.500 directories from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), covering electronic directory services.

Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR)
The OSCAR clustering project has released version 1.2, beta 5. The major feature of these beta releases, as noted by 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.

Samba
Jim McDonough has written a new Samba 3.0 alpha patch, which has been committed in CVS. "This patch enables Samba 3.0 alpha to respond in ASCII on the wire for older clients, such as smbfs," Jim notes. "Previously, Samba 3.0 alpha was always sending string responses back to the client in Unicode, which did not work for older clients, including smbfs. Adding the check at response time for the format the client requested enables Samba to respond correctly each time, enabling even clients that switch between ASCII and Unicode to work."

Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (SBLIM)
The SBLIM (pronounced "sublime") project has released NPI 0.9.4, RPM 0.9.4, FSVOL 1.0, and Reference Implementation 0.5.2. The NPI release features NPI support for the WBEM Services CIMOM, which allows SBLIM providers to execute under most of the current open source CIMOMs, and enhancements for Pegasus; the RPM release was a refresh needed to support NPI 0.9.2. The FSVOL release added several new and updated functionalities, detailed in the release notes. In the new reference implementation, the main view of SRI has been changed to show the leaf nodes in the rightmost pane.

The most important goal of the SBLIM project is to provide a complete suite of CIMOM providers (or "instrumentation") for Linux implementing the CIM Schema. Doing this will enable GNU/Linux systems for WBEM. As of version 2.5, the CIM Schema consists of the following sub-schemas: Core, Application, Device, Events, Network, Metrics, Physical, Policy, Support, System, User, and Network. The CIMOM technology from SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association, provides client and server with CIM/WBEM technologies.

SBLIM, the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability project, is working to enhance the manageability of GNU/Linux systems. It does so by enabling GNU/Linux for WBEM, Web Based Enterprise Management, a set of standards defined by the DMTF and fostered by the WBEMsource initiative.

USB
Nine new USB patches have been posted on the new LTC patch page as of mid-January. The patches cover everything from keeping the 2.5.x kernel in sync with 2.4.x changes to work on specific drivers and USB ioctl numbers. All of the patches were written by Greg Kroah-Hartman, and have been submitted either to the relevant kernel maintainer, Linus Torvalds, or the USB project. The patches, along with more specific functional details, are also available through the LTC patch page.

Serious work on Linux USB support began with the 2.4 kernel, although much of that work has been backported to kernels through 2.2.18. Work now being done for the 2.5 kernel will be backported into all 2.4 versions. Among the changes to look for are new vendor-specific device drivers, new class drivers, USB 2.0 support, and work on the USB Serial driver core. Linus Torvalds began work on the Linux USB driver in 1999. More information on current and past USB development, as well as mailing lists and archives, can be found on the Linux USB site.

Yet Another Malloc Debugger (YAMD)
The YAMD patch has been updated to support both 31-bit and 64-bit Linux/390. The major update is that the patch now accounts for an error code change in the kernel.

The YAMD project team describes it as a package to help find bugs related to dynamic memory allocation, such as memory leaks and array boundary checking. The yamd-s390.patch1212002 runs on both 31-bit and 64-bit S/390 Linux. Nate Eldredge, the patch author, lists its distinct features in the README file on his site.

Articles written by members of the LTC
Alan Robertson's presentation for the OSCAR project, Standardizing Cluster APIs, is available through the LTC white papers page. Robertson also presented Clustering on Linux at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York in January.

Miscellaneous news

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the klibc 0.1, a Linux kernel C library that emerged out of his work on dietLibc. The discussion (rounds one and two) for the rationale behind klibc also involved a list of further requirements and discussions of usefulness and purpose.
The release of Linux kernel 2.5.2 has been announced, along with full USB 2.0 support, also done by Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Resources

Read the previous LTC bulletins on developerWorks:
- January 31, 2002
- January 23, 2002
- 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:
- Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) project (SourceForge)
- High Availability Linux project (linux-ha.org)
- PCI Hotplug for Linux project (SourceForge)
- Internationalization patches (I18N) (developerWorks)
- IPv6 patch (developerWorks)
- Journaled File System (JFS) project (developerWorks)
- Linux Scalability Effort (SourceForge)
- Miscellaneous patches (developerWorks)
- OpenLDAP project (OpenLDAP.org)
- Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) project (SourceForge)
- Samba patch (developerWorks)
- Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (SBLIM) project (developerWorks)
- USB patch (developerWorks)
- Yet Another Malloc Debugger (YAMD) patch (developerWorks)
Check out Linux for S/390: Linux meets the mainframe (Developer Toolbox, April 2001) for an overview of and tips for developing for Linux for S/390 systems.
Read Linux clustering cornucopia (developerWorks, May 2000) for a guide through the maze of both open- and closed-source clustering solutions available for Linux.
Take our free JFS fundamentals tutorial (developerWorks, January 2001)
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.