openMosix Is Shutting Down 252
jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."
If it's really necessary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that kind of the point of open source?
Re:If it's really necessary... (Score:5, Insightful)
As with any project requiring something a lot more than a hobbyist the level of expertise required to work on the codebase is rare, and not cheap.
The only real hope is that a company or university using it is happy to pick up the tab and pay someone.
Unfortunately the "everyone can see the source code" line doesnt give any comfort when you are talking specialised things like clustering. I probably know a total of one person with the skill to work on such a system, and last I spoke to him he was contracting at 130 an hour - for comparitively easy (and less stressful)
Re:If it's really necessary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that kind of the point of open source?
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't really work out that way. If the lead devs leave a large project, the task of other people getting up to speed can be huge to impossible. It takes a long time to learn a system, especially if you're just doing it as a hobby.
Brain drain is a problem in any project, open or closed.
Uh, I think the summary misses the point of OSS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that happens. People's lives don't stand still, they change: they take on other commitments at work, have relationships, travel the world, etc.
But that doesn't mean that openMosix is dead.
On the contrary. This is open source software.
The code isn't lost. Others can pick up the slack and join the effort as they see fit. openMosix can still move forward, perhaps not at the same pace as before, but forward nevertheless.
It seems to me that the summary misses the point of OSS. If this was a closed source project and the lead developers had walked away then, yes, openMosix would almost certainly be dead and buried.
But, unless I'm missing something huge this isn't the end of the line for openMosix, precisely because it is open source.
It hardly seems appropriate to look at this as a failing of OSS development. On the contrary, it's arguably an example of one of its strengths.
This a baton change not a retirement. At best, the new holder(s) of the baton will soon hit the same stride as the previous holder(s). At worst, the baton has fallen to the ground and it simply needs to be picked up.
Re:If it's really necessary... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if no one picks it up, than clearly, it's not as popular as we are led to believe. Honestly, it it's that impotent, development will continue, otherwise, maybe it's not that important.
"the mainstay of Open Source clustering..."? (Score:2, Insightful)
LOL what?! The poster must be on crack. OpenMosix/Mosix is nothing but an experimental/buggy piece of software used by hobby clusterers, it works with 2.4 kernels but never had good support on 2.6. Real cluster software consists of PBS/Maui or some other queueing/scheduler built in house.
Article summary is an overreaction (Score:4, Insightful)
Best of the best? I may get flamed for this, but I'd barely heard of OpenMosix.
When Apache, the Linux kernel, Eclipse and (name a popular GNU project) look like "shutting down", then maybe we can bleat about the failure of open source.
And as some have said, there's not real reason the baton can't be passed on to interested new parties.
Read between the lines people! (Score:3, Insightful)
The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.
"""
Translation: The developers have found new shiny objects to play with and are going to drop this to play with something new.
Remember that OSS is mostly about developers scratching an itch. Once that itch is scratched, if a new shiny object is put in-front of a developer, chances are they'll drop what they're doing to pursue the new thing. As seems to be the case here.
i.e. New is fun, maintenance is boring, boring sucks, do something new.
Re:Open Source Conundrum (Score:4, Insightful)
MS regularly end of lifes things. Just recently the EOL'd foxpro. Sure its a crap language and a crap environment, but I know 5 people personally who are frantically trying to teach themselves
You can still get the openMosix code, if you had openMosix experts you could still fix things and move forward. If you have an existing system on openMosix you can look for a different solution and move to it or keep your system on the existing code. I really don't see how this is any different than MS calling for an EOL of Windows NT. When they do that you are forced to invest tons of hours and money buying new systems, developing a migration plan, deploying the new system, training users on it... It is no different in Open source or closed source, when vendors decide they aren't supporting you anymore, it costs you money.
Vendors regularly leave users out in the cold, both closed source and open. Only difference is, if a company wanted to pick up openMosix they certainly could. They could provide support, ongoing development, whatever. When MS EOLs something, your only choice is to take whatever MS gives you.
Re:orly? (Score:3, Insightful)
well you aren't in that line of work (Score:3, Insightful)
I would in fact maintain it if I cared. I don't care.
BTW, I have doubts about the
Important info (dammit, I have modpoints) (Score:4, Insightful)
See http://mulix.livejournal.com/199931.html [livejournal.com]
"Now the real project can get the credit it deserves. I hate it when people steal credit. It was so annoying to read interviews where it was claimed that behind openMosix are years of research, when all this research was actually behind MOSIX."
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I'm sure they'd look down on a very well paying job that was far far less stressful.
Re:Uh, I think the summary misses the point of OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Some utility bits of open source of course do not need a lot of maintaining and reach full maturity pretty early and only require the odd tweak for hardware compatibility, for those projects maintaining a team is difficult, logically speaking those projects get pick up and carried by another open source project that can run them as a side line.
Re:Read between the lines people! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why this IS important (Score:2, Insightful)
The moderators are woefully uninformed.
We are not at the end of network technology. You're talking about essentially consumer-level stuff. There's a vast amount of network technology out there that goes beyond what Infiniband provides.
Software that needs very high bandwidth won't work on a cluster and probably won't work very well on a single-socket desktop either. Right tool for the right job and all that. There are plenty of codes out there that want tens or hundreds of thousands of cores. Some can even run on clusters. Others need something a bit meatier.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:4, Insightful)
It is telling Moshe Bar is now doing Xen and KVM (Score:4, Insightful)
Using various ISA interfaces (MPI in the low end, or Hypervisor abstractions like Xen, etc. etc.) you can run many guest OSs in the space as needs require, and localize the shared-memory-ness as required to get maximum threading benefit with the lowest total latency you can tolerate. All this with minimally modified guest OSs in which to run the code. This is a much better situation then heavily modified kernels pretending to be a single system image (and then having to worry about forking/threading/VFS issues and propogation of that stuff).
On the flip side, grid technology and speciality message-passing libraries fill out the feature set for more embarassingly parallel problems that need lots of CPU and RAM... you have the luxury of spending time and money coding your applications for that environment if you are CPU limited.
Mosix doesn't have much use anymore as a general purpose product. Either it's too heavy-weight (and drowning in syncro overhead) and we should be relying on firmware/hypervisors that are customized for the hardware, or it's not necessary because we can handle the load balancing at a higher level.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, the person I initially replied to was of the opinion that nobody who could do the sort of work that openMosix requires would deign to "dumb himself down" (figuratively speaking) to writing c#/.net code even if it was netting the guy $130/hr. Personally, I call BS. After a while, you learn that you work to live instead of living to work.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:5, Insightful)
a. don't want their minds and skills to rot
b. get bored by the easy stuff
c. are not stressed by difficult hacking (stress comes from office politics)
d. like to be admired for their ability to do the difficult stuff
e. like to be in the company of peers who can do the difficult stuff
You might get a great hacker doing lame stuff, but you'd have to pay him much MORE than you'd have to pay him to do the difficult stuff. The extra pay would compensate for the extra boredom. Since you can get a warm body for much less money, you're unlikly to hire the great hacker.
Since C#/.net is very lame compared to the challenges of something like OpenMosix, we can pretty reliably conclude that the supposed hacker is not really qualified to hack on OpenMosix. (alternate theory: his dad is the CEO and so the pay is quite absurd for the job being done)
Wrong and wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
Weather prediction almost certainly uses special-purpose math libraries (ScaLAPACK, etc.) in a MIMD environment.
In summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
*MOSIX was supposed to provide an EASY way of doing clustered worth. Low over head in terms of coding and administration. It was aimed at MODERATE clusters not massive beasts as it lacked performance/efficiency. While two extra machines may be worth the lower overhead two hundred probably are not so the immense clusters used other methods.
Advanced in computing, multiple cores and so on, have killed this low-to-medium cluster market NOT clustering as a whole.
Yes there are tons of things that still need clustering, think web data for example for a new one, but they are large and even larger. They need performance and so *MOSIX is not what they are looking for.
In other words the market for *MOSIX is effectively dead thus the project is joining it.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:5, Insightful)
For a lot of people, that happens about the time they have their first kid. For others, it happens sooner. Yet others experience it later, to the detriment of their families if they have them.
I also have to tell you that it's not uncommon for a good independant contractor to be paid more than $130/hour because most consulting companies bill out their contractors at that much or more. Honestly speaking, my top hourly rate thus far has been more than $130/hr.
You may learn that your ideal of the "great hacker" is rather off the mark some day. The truth is that the really good people often don't care about how great others think they are. They get things done, and move on with what they have to do.
Thats one of the benefits of open source (Score:4, Insightful)
Others may have different solutions to the same problem, and you are all free to attack it in your own way. In a totally free environment, you can determine the best solution to the problem using proof-by-mindshare.
As time moves on, the landscape changes, and some/none/all of your assumptions about the problem domain that drive your solution get challenged.
If it appears that your solution is no longer relevant, and that other methods work better in the real world, then your project can successfully conclude, and you can move on to the next big thing. In this case, OpenMosix can see that it's solution to the problem is not the ideal way to go, as evidenced by the fact that MPI, load balancers, (insert other solutions), tend to be more applicable to most real world problems
In a way, an open source software development is a test of a hypothesis. You dont measure success just by proving the hypothesis - you can also disprove it (or spawn a new one), and still claim success.
If this had been a commercial / proprietry project, then everything would be different - there would be egos and money on the line, so the motivations for doing the project in the first place are very very different. If OpenMosix was commercial, higher ups in the company would be moving the goalposts to suit themselves, spending money on advertising and kickbacks, and putting effort into forcing it into sitations where it wasnt the ideal answer. The resultant mindshare and marketshare in a commercially driven enviroment yields sub-optimal solutions - its based on which solution has the best political backing and advertising budget, not the one that best fits the problem.
See, its like this - to an opensource mindset, the hottest person in da club is the one that gets _given_ the most phone numbers. To a non-opensource mindset, the hottest person in da club is the one who can _buy_ the most phone numbers. Someone thought that the flouro lime green shirt might be a good idea
The sort of people who read the headline of the story and see it as a bad thing, a negative thing, an anti-FLOSS thing
Thank goodness open source allows a project to go from conception to conclusion for all the right reasons.
Re:Open Source Conundrum (Score:3, Insightful)
So here's a personal anecdote: Microsoft, Inc. held a free training session/love-in for devs and wannabee devs at a vacated movie theater in Bellevue, WA. It was ~2003 and I was one of the wannbee-devs-in training in the audience. Bellevue is maybe five miles from the "promised land" of Microsoft's RedWest campus and One Microsoft Way and MSFT managers were supervising the proceedings. I recall some discussion of extending Office 2003, some interesting demos of Visual Studio, and a lovely parting gift of an Intel webcam, which I still have. (thanks, guys!)
An older grizzled bearded guy stands up during one of the Q&A's, his voice tinged with injury: "...but what plans do you have for FoxPro?! Some of us spent a lot of time building these skills." Answer from a Microsoft PM presenting in front of his colleagues and managers: ~"I don't think there are specific plans, and it's very unclear whether that product will be developed further." Followup: "[insert whining here]". Answer to the followup: ~"I've tried to give you a pretty honest answer about where VFP is going, and my suggestion would be to look at growing your skills with .NET if you're interested in developing for MSFT platforms."
I'm not sure how much clearer it gets than that. The writing has been on the wall for VFP for years and years now, and you would have to be borderline negligent as a dev not to realize that. A benefit of playing with proprietary frameworks is that the corporations that own them tend to be pretty up-front about their future. Around 2002 I was learning faux-OO VBScript/ASP (lol), but I quickly recognized that path was a dead end. Developers cannot afford to fall asleep at the switch. Anyone who was surprised by the death of ASP or FoxPro wasn't at all serious to begin with.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me? So you're saying that the language dictates how "complex" the language is dictates how fun a project in the given language can be?
I certainly think it is likely that OpenMosix presents a lot of interesting technical challenges that any good developer would love to get his hands on, but a complex business system in c#(or java for that matter) present a DIFFERENT kind of interesting technical challenges!
Re:YA, RLY. (Score:5, Insightful)
any enterprises relying on openMosix to run their operations are in a pretty bad spot right now, i agree. their enterprise quality support has evaporated.
of course, this would be a completely different story if it were a close-source program they were relying on... because... ?
companies go out of business, too. and when their close-source programs are no longer supported, *no one* has the ability to pick up where they left off.
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:4, Insightful)
openMosix was doomed to fail like this at some point. Countless academic projects attempt to improve Linux for their specific needs in the wrong way. They release their work as patches never intended to merge with the kernel, or fork the kernel and never merge again. Over time you can guess what happens -- it becomes impossible to cope with the rate of change that others force on you, and the grant budget never considered ongoing maintenance costs, so the the patches become worthless, or the kernel fork unmaintained. So now Moshe is in deep, and nobody else wants to touch it.
hmmm.. (Score:3, Insightful)
To proclaim this is an object of example for the failure of OSS projects - my god, what a leap of stupidity that is. In reality, i'd be claiming the exact opposite in that it was one of the few SSI's to get into real world situations and be used quite heavily - which means it was actually very successful. It's a project that made it through a complete life cycle, birth, success and death. I would say its probably dying slightly before its time, but the authors reasons are quite sound in reality.
This is something you just don't often see in the CSS world - companies make something and want/need to make money off it (indefinitely if possible), so not only do they bring a new version with more bells and whistles every year (even when the prior version only had 10% of its bells and whistles used) they're continuously pushing to continue making money off the product, and that often means "never expire the product, morph it if we must, but every coder hour is less profit - sales are dropping, NEW VERSION TIME!". Wow, that was even less cynical than I normally am!
Re:well you aren't in that line of work (Score:3, Insightful)
a. don't want their minds and skills to rot
b. get bored by the easy stuff
c. are not stressed by difficult hacking (stress comes from office politics)
d. like to be admired for their ability to do the difficult stuff
e. like to be in the company of peers who can do the difficult stuff
You're not describing hackers, you're describing anti-social assholes. Specifically the last two points, which sum basically to:
d. you want the idiot masses to bow before your superiority.
e. you want to show-off to the people around you, but you need to believe that they're hackers, too, otherwise they won't get how great you are.
f. (implied) hate working with anybody else ever on anything. Teamwork is for suckers!
Since C#/.net is very lame compared to the challenges of something like OpenMosix, we can pretty reliably conclude that the supposed hacker is not really qualified to hack on OpenMosix.
How do you know what he's doing in C#/.net? One's a computer language, one's a run-time environment... they can be used for lame as well as non-lame projects. How does the choice of language say anything about his capabilities?
You want to hear something *really* shocking? Some hackers do very challenging and difficult projects in JAVASCRIPT! Running in a web browser! Amazing.
(It was a mistake for the grandparent to even mention the language. Or, if he did, he should have lied and said Python or Ruby which are the same damned thing, but get more respect from people like parent because they're open source.)
(alternate theory: his dad is the CEO and so the pay is quite absurd for the job being done)
Maybe he just wants to go home at the end of the day, put his feet up, and relax. Instead of working 16 hours a day like most "real hackers" do. Maybe he wants to *gasp* spend time with his family and friends. Maybe he was doing "real hacking" and someone came along and offered him much more pay for equivalent work and he's not a total moron so he took it.
Want to hear something even more shocking? People PAY you for C#/.net work! Nobody pays for OpenMosix. (And talking some corporation into it would involve a lot of those "politics" that "real hackers" hate so much.)
sure, it would be very yucky (Score:3, Insightful)
That all comes under desire though, not ability. ("desire" as in "I'd like to do this", not "I'd like somebody else to do this")
I've known quite a few people with the ability. I expect that any of them, including myself, would actually maintain Mosix if either:
a. we had strong personal reasons to want Mosix
b. we got paid decently
For those of us with the ability, all it takes is the desire -- which I'm not seeing. Mosix just isn't worth the trouble.