Aneesh Kumar K.V

I migrated all my journal entries from livejournal to blogger. The main reason for migrating was the ability to add multiple widgets to the blog page. So this would be my last livejournal entry. The new blog address is http://aneesh-kumar.blogspot.com/

Last Friday (19th Jan 2007) was my last day at HP. After 6 years 11 months and 19 days stay at HP, I felt a little bit awkward to say good bye. During this period I learnt quiet a lot. I was lucky to have a lot of nice friends. I also met my life partner there. A big thanks to HP for giving me such a wonderful time.

I am moving to IBM. I will be joining the Linux technology center.

I have updated LKCF patches to 2.6.20-rc1 kernel. gitweb link

I was at Redhat Developer Day yesterday. Quiet a good event. Learnt about 108 and OLPC. I was there as the HP speaker. Being a developer day we decided to present developer oriented topics and this resulted in me presenting about Linux kernel Cluster Framework. I guess the presentation went fine.

I haven't got any mail notification yet. But i can see it on the website here.

Submitted a talk on Linux kernel cluster framework (LKCF. Hopefully it will get selected. This is the first time i am submitting a talk for FOSS.IN.

This is the 0.2 release of Linux kernel Cluster Framework.

What is LKCF:
-----------
LKCF's aim is to provide a transport independent cluster communication
framework within the kernel. This enables the developers to write
kernel based cluster services without being worried about
communication transport. It also support RPC style programming. That
means to write kernel service one need to write the service definition
file (.svc>) and the implementation API. LKCF framework will
generate all the registration routines and the marshaling code. Also
it takes care of forwarding the SIGNALs across different nodes.The
particular service can be called from any node specifying the node at
which this particular service need to be executed. All the underlying
management interface is taken care by the LKCF.

What transport are supported as of today:
---------------------------------------
IPV4
Infiniband verbs/RDMA.

Project Documentation:
---------------------
http://ci-linux.sourceforge.net/

Project git repository:
---------------------------
http://git.openssi.org/~kvaneesh/gitweb.cgi?p=ci-to-linus.git;a=summary

The patches can be found at
http://git.openssi.org/~kvaneesh/ics_patches/lkcf-0.2/

and include

0001-Internode-communication-subsystem-for-Linux.txt
0002-ICS-over-Infiniband-verbs-work-in-progress.txt
0003-Token-facility-needed-for-cluster-based-synchronization.txt
0004-A-simple-test-case-for-ICS.txt

The patches are on top of git SHA1
ef7d1b244fa6c94fb76d5f787b8629df64ea4046 of the linus tree.

I have merged the work stan smith was doing with Infiniband and OpenSSI. I have pushed the changes here with changes to make it work with LKCF. I also tested the changes with a two node cluster with infiniband interconnect and it seems to work fine.

This is nothing but the CI rework i have been doing. The code has changed in such a way that it is not possible to build CI service module on the code base that i have without modification. So i decided to rename the work to LKCF.

I really liked this.

"upstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system."

"upstart is an event-based init daemon; events generated by the system cause jobs to be started and running jobs to be stopped. Events can include things such as:

* the system has started,

* the root filesystem is now writable,

* a block device has been added to the system,

* a filesystem has been mounted,

* at a certain time or repeated time period,

* another job has begun running or has finished,

* a file on the disk has been modified,

* there are files in a queue directory,

* a network device has been detected,

* the default route has been added or removed."

http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/upstart.html

Today I released the 0.1 version of ICS. You can find the details here. Now from here there is quiet a lot of things that we can do such as:

a) Add another transport. sctp, tipc, infiniband verbs etc.
c) Get other cluster projects to start using it.

From OpenSSI code i am trying to pull CFS code and other cluster wide SYSV IPC code. Once we get this done we will have clusterwide shared memory.

I have added support for urls and snapshots to gitweb. Both these changes are right now in next branch of git repository. The url support helps in finding out the the url that need to be used when you do a git-clone. The snapshot support helps you in getting a tar.gz image of the repository files at any commit point. This should help if you want to download the code without looking at the history. Along with that did some nice cleanups making blame and snapshot a feature which can be enabled/disabled via GITWEB_CONFIG and also project specific config.

This should give you the details.

http://git.openssi.org/~kvaneesh/gitweb.cgi?p=ci-to-linus.git;a=summary

Now that i have CI done i am looking at progressing with different components of OpenSSI cluster as below

a) Get the token based synchronization working
b) Get CFS working
c) Get Clusterwide name server working
d) Get message queue and semaphore working
e) Get clusterwide shared memory working.


I have done the first cut of cleanup with respect to token code and did a git push. You can find them here http://git.openssi.org/~kvaneesh/gitweb.cgi?p=ci-to-linus.git;a=summary. Follow the 2.6.18-rc1-ci-to-linus branch.

BTW it is quiet a lot of work to get this done in free time. So in case you would like to help me let me know.

I submitted all the changes required to build a CI cluster via configfs. This is really important in the sense it gets us on fast track in having a proper cluster manager in user space. I am right now looking at CMAN. With the current code base, one can configure the cluster with the below steps

ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.15 netmask 255.255.255.0
mount -t configfs none /config
mkdir /config/ics/node2
echo -n "192.168.2.15" > /config/ics/node2/icsinfo
echo -n "2" > /config/ics/node2/nodenum
ln -s /config/ics/node2 /config/ics/this_node
./cluster_config --preroot
./cluster_config --postroot
echo -n "NODE_UP" > /config/ics/node2/status
echo -n "NODE_READY" > /config/ics/node2/status

To inform regarding other nodes status
mkdir /config/ics/node3
echo -n "192.168.2.16" > /config/ics/node3/icsinfo
echo -n "3" > /config/ics/node3/nodenum
echo -n "NODE_CONFIG" > /config/ics/node3/status
echo -n "NODE_UP" > /config/ics/node3/status
echo -n "NODE_READY" > /config/ics/node3/status

I have been working on CI code preparing it for submitting upstream. You can check the work here. Today i was able to run a simple test case of invoking a service on the second node. Right now the membership is
configured from the user space via system call. I need to convert it to use configfs and CMAN.

We now have git.openssi.org

here

It is quiet a long time I updated my blog. That is mainly because I was busy cleaning up CI. Cluster infrastructure is an opensource project from HP. It implements a transport independent method of communicating across different nodes in a cluster. It also makes writing a cluster service extremly easy. Take a look at the documentation here.

The reason for working on CI code is to get it merged with the vanilla Linux kernel (Linus kernel tree). Linux currently lacks a framework for writing cluster kernel services. Take a look at Oracle's OCFS or Redhat GFS. Both use their own mechanism for communicating to other nodes in a cluster. OCFs use TCP and GFS use sctp. I wanted to continue the process management work ( cluster proc ) done as a part of OpenSSI project and was looking at different ways of writing cluster services. That made me to look at CI code. The idea right now is to remove the kernel based cluster membership code and use Redhat CMAN.

You should be able to find the status at here. I haven't pushed the code base yet. I have removed the CLMS code base and did quiet a lot of cleanups. Once i get the code compiled I will push it to radian. The second stage will be CMAN integration. Once i get CMAN integrated i would like to add one more lowlevel transport for CI. As a part of OpenSSI project Stan Smith had CI over Infiniband code base. I guess we didn't got it submitted to CVS. I will also try to get that integrated as well. I am also looking at having CI over TIPC . I know it is quiet a lot of work. So if anybody is interested let me know.

After reading this

"Concentration
It's maybe a little fashionable to use terms like "information overload" and that all our technology is making us less productive. I'm starting to buy into this theory a little more though. I'm having a lot of trouble keeping myself focused on any one task for an extended period of time. I constantly jump between task A to task B to check email C, making a little progress here and there, but I think I'm hurting myself with all these context switches. I can't seem to stop myself anytime I have to wait for something (even very briefly), my focus switches to something else.

The most problems are at work. Now I'm fairly sure the environment has a lot to do with it. It's an open concept type, with a few cubicle walls here and there. People are constantly interrupting me with questions and random conversations can break out frequently. For the most part I really like these aspects, but it can be very hard to concentrate on a task. Home isn't much better though. I have trouble just concentrating on one task, I almost always have a movie or TV going at the same time, and I can't seem to turn it off."

more..

I found myself saying "same here" ( :( )

Last few weeks i was trying to move the OpenSSI code from CVS to git. With OpenSSI we have a complicated tagging which even made viewcvs stop working. So my attempt to convert OpenSSI CVS to git using different git import export tools didn't work. So i ended up dropping all the code history and starting fresh with the 1.9.1 release. That means in the repository i have the base version of different packages and their respective openssi version as of 1.9.1 release. You can see the result of the work here


This may not be the final repository so if you are seriously working on OpenSSI code you should not base your development against these repositories. But I would very much like to get feedback regarding what others think of the current layout.

Using network manager for managing network with my laptop also means a mostly empty /etc/network/interfaces for me. This also resulted in spamd not starting properly. This made me look for other alternatives. I also had a feeling that spamassasin is too heavy for my usage. I decided to try bogofilter. Till now it is all working fine.