LTC bulletin: November 28, 2001
News in brief from IBM's Linux Technology CenterMaya Stodte (mstodte@yahoo.com)
Technology journalist
November 2001
Our biweekly news from the IBM Linux Technology Center -- where all the Linux-related technologies happening inside IBM are tracked -- briefs you on several new releases, including Channel Bonding, EVMS, and JFS, as well as the big open source release of Eclipse, the Java-based IDE designed to ease tool development integration, the initial launch of the Mini-libc Builder, and updates to the documentation pages of the LTC.
The updates in this bulletin are arranged alphabetically by project. To find out more about any of these projects and others, go directly to the Linux Technology Center.
Channel Bonding
The Channel Bonding project has released their version 20011112 patch for the 2.4.14
kernel, which was incorporated into the 2.4.15pre series kernel. Release notes for
the current and all previous stable releases are available from the project's site
on SourceForge.
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.
DLM
Distributed Lock Manager version 1.0rc1 has been released. If no fatal flaws are
found in 1.0-rc2, 1.0 (final) will be released by the first week in December. The
major feature of this release is the addition of the DLM API in the kernel. A list
of other changes and bug fixes is available from the project site.
The project team describes the Distributed Lock Manager as an implementation of the classic VAX Cluster, locking semantics for a Linux cluster. The DLM handles recovery from failure of various components within the cluster, and provides a defined interface for connecting to arbitrary cluster infrastructures. The current implementation connects to the Heartbeat clustering toolkit.
Eclipse
The Eclipse project has made its first open source release. The latest 2.0 development
stream builds have also been posted and can be downloaded from the project site.
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. Newsgroups are available through the project site.
Get an introduction to the Eclipse Platform and how it operates, and see the benefits that tool developers can expect in developerWorks' interview with OTI marketing lead, Marc Erickson. (See the Resources later in this article for more information on Eclipse.)
EVMS
A new packaged version of Enterprise Volume Management Systems, version 0.2.3, is
now available. I/O bugs in the system data layer and the EVMS snapshotting plug-in
were fixed in this release, as well as feature-header handling bugs in the engine.
EVMS does logical volume management with plug-in model architecture in order to maximize extensibility and flexibility.
Event Logging
Event Logging for the Enterprise has released version 1.1.0 and published an updated
draft for a POSIX Event Logging standard, as well as a Linux Event Logging specification.
Both of these documents are available through the project site on SourceForge. Among
the changes in v1.1.0 are a new library, a display of events logged in the kernel,
and several new additions and bug fixes.
In other related news, the Device Driver Event Logging project now provides a patch to collect detailed statistics for the aic7xxx scsi driver. Previous patches cover the QLogic FC Driver and the ServerRaid Driver.
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).
Internationalization patches (I18N)
An Internationalization patch for GNU grep has been updated. The patch, written
by Isamy Hasegawa, makes changes to the grep commands to support multi-byte character
sets and locale-sensitive behavior. It has been committed in a beta release.
JFS
JFS release 1.0.9 is now available. This is the 47th drop of the file system, with
the temporary restriction that the block size must be 4K. MKFS.jfs defaults the
block size to 4K. Among the changes was a fix to the data corruption problem that
previously occurred when files were created at the same time that others were deleted.
JFS should also quit whining when special files are marked dirty during read-only
mount, according to the changelog. A complete list of changes to the function and
fixes of the utilities and the JFS, beginning with the first release, are available
in 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. Work is underway to complete the port to Linux.
Lanstreamer patch
The Lanstreamer patch Token Ring driver has been updated with bug fixes. The patch
was written by Kent Yoder and has been submitted to the Linux Token Ring Project.
"It rearranges the interrupt function" Kent explains, "adding several delays and
workarounds for known hardware limitations. Anyone using kernel 2.4 with Lanstreamer
is strongly encouraged to apply this patch."
The Lanstreamer patch is a contribution to the Linux Token Ring Project. The LTRP deals with issues relating to using Token Ring under Linux and provides a centralized forum for consultations and contributions in this area.
Linux Accessibility
The Linux Accessibility Web site has been updated to show recent contributions,
which include the final release of the Emacspeak Users Guide, and a revision and
update of the Accessibility HOWTO on Linuxdoc.org.
The IBM Linux Accessibility Team contributes to the open source community's accessibility efforts in order to help accelerate Linux.
LSB
The Linux Standards Base project has posted a white paper covering the LSB 1.0 Test
Suite by Kevin Caunt of the LTC. The document includes sections on ABI-related tests,
API-related tests, and other relevant tests.
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 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 20011107. The new release covers ten
detailed changes, which are listed in the changelog on the project's SourceForge
site.
"The Linux Test Project is a group aimed at testing and improving Linux," as noted by 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 previous package from the LTP is version 20010801. The changelog notes that "there are several minor bugfixes 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."
Loadable Securities Module
The Linux Security Module project has created a new Loadable Securities Module patch
to enable execve() process limit checking to function as a loadable module.
The Linux Security Module began releasing patches in April of this year and has since then produced 28 patches. The current patch was released in November 2001 and is against kernel 2.4.14. The module project designs, implements, and maintains security enhancements to the Linux kernel. "The prototypical module to be produced," the team notes, "would be to port the POSIX Privs code out of the kernel and make it a module. An essential part of this project will be that the resulting work is acceptable for the mainline Linux kernel." A changelog documenting the updates to each Security Module patch is available, as is a Linux Security Module mailing list.
Mini-libc Builder
The initial launch of the Mini-libc Builder project has been released. The Mini-libc
Builder, as the team explains, is designed to save space in memory-constrained systems
through a series of Perl scripts and other tools that can be used to rebuild libc.so,
the major piece of glibc, such that it contains only the objects needed to support
a selected set of applications. It is licensed under the GNU GPL.
Miscellaneous patches
Mingming cao wrote a Linux kernel patch for disk I/O statistics, which has been
submitted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "This is a patch to dynamically allocate
the data buffers for the disk statistics," Mingming notes, "and to extend the gathering
of disk statistics to include major numbers greater than 15."
See other miscellaneous patches produced by members of the LTC.
System Configurator
System Configurator 1.0 is now available. "The 1.00 release includes support for
Red Hat, SuSE, Turbo Linux, Linux Mandrake, Connectiva, and Debian," the release
notes state. "It has support for Lilo and Grub on x86, Elilo on IA64, and Yaboot
on SuSE PPC Linux. It also includes automatic hardware detection and experimental
initial ramdisk generation."
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, 2001.
Documentation from the LTC
The LDoc page has been updated to show recent contributions, which include fifteen
patches with enhancements to the LSB spec, revisions and updates to the EVMS HOWTO,
an article on OpenCryptoki written with Steven Bade and published on developerWorks,
and several function definitions for the glibc manual that have been submitted to
the maintainer.
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 2001