Open Mosix

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
:
:I think it is not irrelevant to mention here the announcement:
:http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=715406
:
:"Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end
:the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008.  
: 
:The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is
:rapidly making single-system image (SSI) Clustering less of a factor in
:computing. The direction of computing is clear and key developers are
:moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects. "

    Well, I don't think multi-core really solves the same problem that SSI
    does, but I also firmly believe that doing SSI properly requires complete
    integration into the kernel to really be effective.
					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>
That could have some nice backfire for this project, if users of 
OpenMosix don't step in and maintain the project it could lead to a 
situation where users are looking for something comparable and end there 
search with DF (when it has these capabilities) :-)

It would definitely help the spread of this project and for BSD in 
general, most administrators I know that have serious worked with 
multiple project end up preferring some kind of BSD over Linux. Most of 
the times because they have a 'distro' which in the whole part is 
covered. That doesn't reduce maintenance when almost everything is 
regulated and automated but it does help to simplify the setup process 
of the automations.

By the way, how far are we planning to get that SSI going, is it like 
having a single VKernel over X amount of hosts? How do you plan to do 
something like network access to that kernel? I would be thrilled if it 
ends up like sharing a NIC from the real host to the VKernel and that 
the VKernel itself could team up all the NIC's and thus assign a single 
IP to it.

If storage can follow about the same path as the above mentioned NIC's 
with an additional option to control the amount of duplications of the 
files (like /usr should be at least available on 3 nodes preferable 
spread to the most distant geographic locations from each other) then it 
would definitely be a killer feature. Well at least for me.

I am still hoping for a system where I can just do the package install 
and maintenance for that system as I was working on a single machine but 
are capable to power off a node from the network do some hardware 
maintenance on that system and then power it on again. While booting the 
 node it reattaches itself to the cluster and happily share it resources.

--
mph