LTC bulletin: March 14, 2002

News in brief from IBM's Linux Technology Center

Maya Stodte (mstodte@yahoo.com)
Technology journalist
March 2002

Our biweekly news in brief from the Linux Technology Center -- where all the Linux-related technologies inside IBM are tracked -- includes a new Accessibility Checklist; interviews with FOSDEM by DProbes project leader Richard Moore and Thierry Matusiak of the Eclipse project; a new IA64 tool; an update to the Global Spinlocks paper; new releases from projects ranging from EVMS to NGPT; and the System Configurator and Installer projects. Links to PDF files of the Developer Habitat Chats from the LinuxWorld Expo are now available.

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.

Accessibility
The Linux Accessibility team has submitted the Linux Software Accessibility Checklist to the KDE Accessibility Project, which is currently focusing on using the Desktop Communications Protocol to make QT GUI information available to external processes. A mailing list and todo list are both available from the KDE project.

The IBM Linux Accessibility Team at the LTC contributes to the open source community's accessibility efforts in order to help accelerate Linux. Some of the specific projects going on in the broader Linux accessibility community include speech synthesizers, Braille, and optical character recognition (OCR). The University of Wisconsin provides an extensive list of current work in the area.

DProbes
DProbes for the S/390 version 2.2.1 has been released. Work on the port to S/390, which is in the early development stages for the 2.4.7 kernel, is being done by Michael Grundy.

In other news from DProbes, project leader Richard Moore recently gave a brief interview to FOSDEM covering DProbes, its uses and applications, and his vision for the future of the project, "I would like to emphasize," Richard notes at the end of this interview, "that we need to grow a Linux RAS Community that speaks with one voice. We are hoping to use OLS for a series of BOF sessions to discuss each of the core RAS technologies."

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).

Eclipse
Thierry Matusiak from the Eclipse project recently gave an interview to FOSDEM covering Eclipse and its place in the market. "Contributing in the Eclipse project means strengthening Java and open standards, which is a strategic approach (vs. a proprietary initiative)," Thierry comments in his interview. "But it's also true that members of the Eclipse project are taking advantage of the ready-to-use services and framework, so that they can focus on the functionalities of tools, rather than on infrastructure. So the development cycle is reduced and quality is improved."

Eclipse is a Java-based open extensible IDE. It operates with tool plug-ins that allow tools from Web applications to C++ programs to Enterprise JavaBeans to be integrated with one another throughout the entire range of development processes, including testing, performance tuning, and debugging. Steve Mills of the IBM Software Group describes the open source Eclipse project as being to software tools what Apache is to Web application servers and what Linux is to operating systems. The project is divided into the Eclipse Project, which works on specific Eclipse technology, and the Eclipse Tools Project, which provides a focal point for tool builders. A newsgroup is available on the project site.

Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS)
The EVMS project has released version 0.9.2 (beta 3), as well as a patch against LILO. EVMS 0.9.2 is the third beta release from the project; this round includes changes to the core engine, GUI, text-mode UI, command line, several plug-ins, and utilities. Release notes are available at the project site on SourceForge.

The LILO patch, against version 22.2, allows kernel images to be stored on EVMS volumes. "EVMS has the necessary ioctl support in version 0.9.2 or later to work with this patch," notes the team. "It is based on Andreas Dilger's LILO patch for LVM."

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

Event Logging
Linux Event Logging for the Enterprise has released version 1.2.0 of the project, and updated its specification. Event Logging 1.2.0 includes changes to events logged in user-space, the library, date and time formatting, and the --value option. A changelog is available on the SourceForge project site. Additional Event Logging features in the works include log management, improved facility code generation, internationalization support, and a filter registry.

The Linux Event Logging for Enterprise-Class Systems logs events and informational messages from kernel subsystems and system applications. The heretofore 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. It is with this in mind that 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).

IA-64
Steve Christianson of the LTC has written a new tool to create an IA32 to IA64 cross-compiler. See the readme notes in the file for more installation and technical details.

Journaled File System (JFS)
JFS has released version 1.0.15. The utilities changes include several updates, and support for 4.4 BSD-style getmntinfo by Christof Hellwig. The file system changes include several fixes and moves, as well as a first step in work on making tblocks and tlocks dynamically allocated. For more details, go to the changelog for JFS 1.0.15. Complete changelogs for the FS and Utilities, which date back to the first release, are now available in separate files. This is the fifty-third release of the JFS since its first beta release in December of 2000.

In more juicy news, JFS has been merged into Alan Cox's kernel tree for version linux-2.4.18-pre9-ac4.

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 Documentation (LDoc)
The LDoc page has been updated to show recent contributions, which include Sharon Snider's Accessibility chapter for the GNOME Users Guide, submitted to the GNOME Documentation Project, and the submission of the white paper, "IBM's Carrier Grade Linux Enhancements," for distribution to Intel.

Linux Scalability Effort
The Linux Scalability Effort has updated its paper on global locks for the 2.4.16 kernel. The paper, according to the team, "simply lists the global locks and what (apparently) they guard. It is presented as a guide to someone who has carefully considered using a global lock and decided it is appropriate to use one.... While these may seem small or inconsequential, they add up. The fewer global locks there are, the fewer misuses can occur, and the easier that performance analysis becomes for other points of contention."

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 project site on SourceForge.

Linux Standard Base
The Linux Standard Base has posted the specification for the IA64 Architecture 0.9.11 for review. The IA64 specification describes both hardware and software implementations for LP64-based implementations (32-bit integers, 64-bit longs and pointers), as opposed to ILP32 implementations, which it does not extend to. Aside from low-level system information, the IA64 specification 0.9.11 also covers object format, program loading and dynamic linking, base libraries, and execution environment.

The project's latest release (1.1) was covered in a BusinessWeek article on the Free Standards Group's announcement of LSB 1.1 (also detailed in the LTC bulletin: February 28, 2001 ) explains the basic intentions of the LSB and its structure. "The standards will make it easier for software companies ... to bring their programs to Linux," explains Scott McNeil, executive director of the Free Standards Group. "It makes it easier for them to know what Linux features can be expected, not only from one company's version of Linux to another, but across newer versions of the same company's product."

The LSB is a family of specifications defining a binary system interface for compiled applications in order to insure a uniform industry-standard environment. The specification consists of a generic LSB and an architecture-specific LSB. The 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.

NGP Threading
The Next Generation POSIX Threading Project has released NGPT version 1.1.2, which was included by Linus Torvalds and the core kernel development team in the 2.5.4-pre2 Linux kernel. Because the changes in this release have resulted in a new kernel patch, a complete review of the release notes is recommended before any update to current systems. Changes in NGPT 1.1.2, listed individually in the changelog, have focused on bug fixes and LinuxThreads compatibility.

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

Omni Print Driver
The Omni print driver project has released Omni version 0.6.0, which features support for 410 different printers. Changes to the new version, detailed in the changelog include new commands, several fixes, six new medias, changes to JobDialogue, and new Ghostscript patches. "This version of Omni adds function and robustness for the use of interprocess communications between Ghostscript and the printer driver, which is proposed for addition to the printing architecture to Freestandards.org," explains the team. "We have added the ability to display a dialog to allow for specific settings for the printer driver when printing a job and updated the interface so that modules can be plugged in to do the setup and data formatting for the printer."

Omni edits old device description files in order to create new devices and allows for the subclassing of previous device features, which simplifies printer driver development.

OpenLDAP
The OpenLDAP core team has granted CVS commit privileges to Julius Enarusai of the LTC to further his work on logging and auditing.

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.

System Configurator
System Configurator and System Installer have released versions 1.10 and 0.7, respectively. System Configurator 1.10 is a minor bug fix release. According to the release notes, it includes a number of bug fixes for SuSE networking support, lilo.conf generation, and better error messages when bootloader setup fails.

Version 0.7 of System Installer, System Configurator's sister project, includes among the new features of this release: simplified package API, support for SuSE, multiple kernels and bootable flag, and new conf file entries. The release also includes a couple of new fixes. "But minimal Devian support," according to the project team, "has fallen by the wayside for now and hasn't been ported to the new API. As before, see the README for more info."

System Configurator and System Installer work in tandem with System Imager, which make up the System Installation Suite. SIS is the result of a merger between the LTC LUI project and SystemImager from VA Linux. Read more about the merger in the LTC bulletin: June 19, 2001 .

Miscellaneous news
The Developer Habitat Chats from LinuxWorld Expo are now available. The chats cover the following projects, as well as a few more general topics: EVMS, SAS, LDAP, Samba, Scalability, LSB, Linux Test Project, Documentation, PPC64, LKCD, IA64, NGPT, DProbes, Security, SCTP, and OpenCryptoki. Links to PDF files of most of the discussion groups are available.

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