SWsoft programmers are working on an open-source virtualization project called OpenVZ that would make it possible to give a single installation of Linux the appearance of being several independent copies of the operating system. But Harald Welte, the lead programmer of the netfilter/iptables firewall software used in Linux, griped last week on his blog that the software didn't support the next-generation IPv6 Internet standard.
Welte's complaint didn't fall on deaf ears. "We have listened to the community and appreciate the feedback and will implement IPv6 support in OpenVZ in a month or two," SWsoft said in a statement.
Welte is delighted with the response. "I never expected such a thorough and immediate response. This is amazing, and it shows how much they actually care even about subjects that might seem a bit obscure in the first place," he told CNET News.com.
Version 6 of the Internet Protocol adds a vastly larger number of Internet addresses than the current IPv4. That's important because some parts of the world--notably Asia--have many fewer fixed addresses than United States companies. Linux and the firewall software has supported IPv6 networking for years.
It's also important for firewall software. Today a technology called network address translation (NAT) effectively lets many computers share the same IP address. But doing so obscures addressing information useful for firewalls--and, according to Welte, standards for voice over Internet Protocol. "NAT breaks end-to-end transparency, which is in turn the single most problematic issue when it comes to fast adoption of new protocols," he said.
Welte would prefer for OpenVZ to make a virtualized version of the lower-level Ethernet network support. That would mean OpenVZ programmers wouldn't have to worry about which higher-level IPv6 or IPv4 a server administrator was using.
Microsoft is planning management software code-named Carmine to oversee virtualization tasks such as starting, stopping or moving virtual machines, Computer Reseller News reported Tuesday.
The software has only some of the features of rival VMware's VirtualCenter management software, according to an unnamed source in the story. Microsoft declined to comment.
Virtualization lets a single computer run several operating systems at once, a feature that permits greater efficiency when juggling multiple tasks. Microsoft, faced with pressure from EMC's VMware and more recently from the open-source Xen software being built into Red Hat and Novell Linux products, has begun more serious work on virtualization beyond its current Virtual Server and Virtual PC products.
Among other things, it's working on a "hypervisor" code-named Viridian, a faster, more flexible approach to the current products. Viridian will be come with an update to the forthcoming Longhorn Server version of Windows.
In addition, Microsoft is working on higher-level virtualization technology that makes a single instance of Windows appear to be several.
Red Hat has begun a project to make drivers, the software modules that enable computers to use devices such as hard drives or network cards, less of a thorny problem in Linux.
The leading Linux company ships many drivers with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, making them relatively easy to use and update, but things get tricky for third-party suppliers, said Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens in an interview. Red Hat hopes to change that.
"We're trying to make the installation and provision more friendly to drivers that aren't developed by Red Hat...whether proprietary or open-source," Stevens said. "It's crazy. There has to be better way of managing drivers."
Red Hat wants to provide metadata that describes which versions of the Linux kernel work with which drivers. The driver installation process would then download the appropriate driver based on the computer's configuration, he said.
Drivers also are a tricky political as well as technical issue. Opinions differ on whether it's permissible to plug proprietary drivers into the open-source Linux kernel. Red Hat hasn't issued a legal opinion on the matter, but doesn't like proprietary drivers for business reasons, Stevens said.
Programmers released version 3.0.2 of the Xen virtualization software Thursday, adding support for a hardware assist called AMD-V coming in future Advanced Micro Devices processors. The feature makes it possible to run unmodified operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, even though Xen relies heavily on Linux.
Version 3.0.2, though only an update to the major changes that came when version 3 was released in December, is nevertheless something of a milestone. It's the version that will be the basis for the virtualization software that will ship with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server, according to Novell.
Xen 3.0.2 is set up to work with the new 2.6.16 version of the Linux kernel, lead programmer Ian Pratt said in an announcement of the new version.
Virtualization today generally refers to software and hardware that let a single computer run multiple operating systems, which is useful for making servers more efficient and isolating desktop applications into noninterfering partitions called virtual machines. Xen, Microsoft and VMware all are working on software called a hypervisor that governs how those virtual machines get access to the hardware resources.
With assistance from Novell and its top competitor, Red Hat, Xen programmers are working to make their software an established part of Linux.
KOffice, an element of the KDE interface software widely used with Linux, now supports the OpenDocument format and uses it by default. The change comes with version 1.5, released Tuesday, project organizers said.
ODF, a standard gaining prominence as a rival to Microsoft's proprietary file formats, is the format used by the dominant open-source application suite, OpenOffice.org.
ODF is used in KWord, KSpread and KPresenter, but work remains. "Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability is not yet perfect," project organizers said in a statement.
KOffice 1.5 also features the debut of Kexi 1.0, a personal database program, and introduces a scripting language that can automate KOffice software. KOffice 2.0 is due near the end of 2006 or early 2007 and will employ KDE 4.0 components designed to make it easy to move applications to Windows and Mac OS X, organizers said.
KDE competes with GNOME, but work is under way to bridge between the two projects.
BOSTON-- Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child organization to bring inexpensive computers to children around the world, wants a version of Linux that's doesn't require fast new processors or large amounts of memory. Puppy Linux would like to help.
The Linux version is 60MB in size and has been successfully run on machines with 100MHz processors and 32MB of memory, said Raffy Mananghaya, the interim chairman of the Puppy Linux Foundation. However, it's better with more than 64MB of memory and 420MB of hard disk space, he said. An Australian named Barry Kauler launched the project in 2003.
Mananghaya approached the OLPC project in August about using its version of Linux, but received a response that Red Hat, the top seller of Linux, was involved.
Red Hat has a team of six or seven involved in the Fedora OLPC project, the company's chief technology officer, Brian Stevens, said in an interview here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.
Puppy isn't the only skinny Linux project. Others include Austrumi and Damn Small Linux.
BOSTON--Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system now runs on x86 servers such as those Dell sells, but the company will consider adding support for the Unix version only if it becomes a standard part of the computing landscape.
That's the conclusion of Judy Chavis, director of business development for Dell's enterprise product group, who spoke in an interview at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here.
"Is it the next industry standard around operating systems? That's what it would take for us to do that," she said. So far, the answer is a definitive no. "Since the year started, I haven't had a Solaris x86 customer come into the briefing center," Chavis said.
Dell evaluated Unix years ago, including Solaris, but eventually chose to stick with Linux. In the intervening years, Sun nearly killed off its x86 version of Solaris but now puts it front and center of its push to make a name for itself in the x86 server market.
"There have been a couple bumps in the road with Solaris. It's going to take customers awhile to believe it's here on the x86 platform and it's going to stay," Chavis said.
Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell's new chief technology officer, has become the latest Linux executive to try his hand at blogging.
Jaffe launched his blog Monday with a 2,700-word posting that derides Microsoft products as "bloatware," discusses the difficulties he faced years ago trying to drum up software company support for IBM's OS/2 operating system, and offers opinions on why things will be different for Linux and open-source software.
It's tough being a high-ranking Linux blogger, though. Martin Fink, head of HP's Linux operations, threw in the towel for his blog, and Red Hat's former CTO Michael Tiemann hasn't posted since June 2005.
The next version of Ubuntu Linux, "Dapper Drake" has been pushed back six weeks to June 1 to permit better quality, Linux Standard Base certification and improved international language support.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the new schedule on Monday on an Ubuntu mailing list.
Shuttleworth proposed the delay last week.
In explaining the delay, he said Monday, "The extra time will help ensure that Dapper is a robust and reliable platform for organizations with long-term and large-scale free software deployments. This is the first release of Ubuntu that will be supported for 5 years on the server and 3 years on the desktop, and we believe that this release will help expand the reach of the Ubuntu and Debian communities substantially."
Though Dapper Drake was delayed, its as yet unnamed sequel is still expected in October, he added.
The news came shortly before Microsoft delayed its own next-generation Windows operating system, Vista.
SAN FRANCISCO--In an effort to make the Xen more useful to computer administrators, Red Hat is working to stabilize the application programming interfaces (APIs) that control the virtualization software. Having fixed APIs will mean higher-level management software can automate various Xen tasks, said Brian Stevens, Red Hat's chief technology officer, in an interview at a news conference here.
Red Hat plans to release its first Xen APIs in the next month or two, Stevens said. The company hopes to stabilize as much as possible before the debut of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 product by the end of the year.
The API work is part of Red Hat's effort to make virtualization a standard part of the mainstream x86 server market, which the company and others argues will improve server efficiency and lower operating costs. Xen lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously, sharing the same hardware and using it closer to its top capacity than is typically the case for stand-alone servers.
The first set of APIs will cover how virtual machines are started, stopped and moved from one physical computer to another, Stevens said. A second set will manage resources such as a virtual machine's processing power, memory or input-output capacity. And a third will deal with control policies--for example, setting limits on hardware resources, changing virtual machine behavior so top priorities are met, or automating changes based on what time of day it is.
VMware, an EMC subsidiary that leads the virtual machine market for x86 servers, has offered its own APIs for some of these tasks, but Red Hat wasn't interested, Stevens said.
"We looked at them," he said, but the "10,000-line specification" was too bulky. "I think you can hit 80 percent of use cases with 20 percent of the code. Plus we want to start simplistic and let the APIs evolve."
