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Motorola Releases HA Linux 132

Posted by Hemos from the yet-another-distro dept.
A reader sent us the word that there's been yet another entry in the Linux Distro Population Index. Yes, Motorola has released a distro they are calling High Availibility Linux. It's released for x86 and PowerPC platforms and is intended to be for embedded systems that need to be "99.999% uptime". They've also released details on their Web site about the system. Their main target is telecom development, according to their press release.
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Motorola Releases HA Linux More

Motorola Releases HA Linux

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  • Will it run on their MPC555? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I haven't been able to access the Motorola Linux page... does anyone know if it will support their MPC555 microcontroller? This "new" PowerPC microcontroller has great Pulse-Width Modulation, Analogue to Digital conversion features plus the ever-important Time Processor Unit (two seperate RISC processors on board). All that and 448Kb (?) of Flash on board the chip. Add some external memory to that and it'd be neat to run Linux on it. For anyone with any background in microcontrollers, this is like an HC11 on steroids. (-:

  • HAL! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has really nobody noticed the abreviation for "HA Linux" is "HAL"?

    Does it already include AI, or will that be added in the next version?

  • Re:Argh! Too many Linuxen (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    HA Linux provides:

    • Hot pluggable CPUs!
    • Hot pluggable fans, IO and power modules
    • SNMP support
    • Inter system communications

    *Yawn*

    No robust Distributed Lock Manager. No true disk serving architecture (NFS and SMB/CIFS are both FILE SERVING architectures which incur CPU overhead, not disk servers). Probably still uses idiotic null-terminated strings rather than descriptors or counted strings .

    Looks like even this distro lacks things crucial for a true mission-critical environment. But at least things are moving in the right direction.

  • Re:%99.999 uptime (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    More proof that Linux sucks and Microsoft rules. 5 minutes per year? That's nothing I get four or five times that a day from Microsoft. Sometimes more. Oh. Wait.
  • Motorola is a good company, but I'm already familiar with another project called High Availability Linux [ha-linux.org] that's been well developed by somebody I know through the Boulder Linux User's Group. I think Motorola should rename their distribution to reduce the amount of confusion on the matter.

    Check this guy's work out, by the way. He's been working on this for quite some time, and his work is well designed.

  • I agree. I was totally stunned that the Gentus story didn't make it onto Slashdot. I didn't bother to write it in, since I assumed that 10,000 others already had.
  • "Should" this and "shouldn't" that. Who gets to define what anybody "should" do. The answer is the GPL. As long as they don't break copyright law, they "should" do whatever they feel like. Of course it would be nice of them to submit any generally useful code to be included in the next kernel. Hot swappable processors? Wow!
  • Most computer users don't know what HA really means, but I honestly don't blame them. It is a very specialized field, and to be completely honest, no desktop user really needs HA in any form or fashion.

    What sickens me is the claim that Motorola makes in their press release.

    "Until now, however, a HA Linux solution for applications that require near constant uptime -- such as Operation Administration & Maintenance (OA&M) platforms, call servers, IP gateways, gatekeepers and home location registers -- was not available. MCG has recognized this need and filled it with its advanced HA Linux offering. "

    This is, quite frankly, bullshit. Wait, don't moderate me down yet, I do know what I'm talking about. I work for a company that sells HA for linux, and has done so for almost a year now. You may have seen me at Comdex Fall or Atlanta Linux Expo, and you might see me at Comdex Spring. I work for Starfire Technology [starfiretechnology.com] and we are the nice people who sell RSF-1 (and coming REAL soon, RSF-2) on behalf of RSI. [high-availability.com] I'm the guy who does the demos. Nice to meet you, especially since my product doesn't exist. ;)

    Not to mention the existence of decent open-source HA for linux. Do a lookup for heartbeat on freshmeat.net.

    I'm not gonna turn this into a sales pitch, but RSF1 (and 2) is a damned good HA solution for Linux. Its small, efficient, very configurable yet informed-user-friendly, and well supported in the linux community. Works on Red Hat, OpenLinux, Debian, and Mandrake (didnt I already say RH though?). Other main point is the fact that RSF1 can make multiple systems HA in a mixed OS environment. RSF1 has been ported to HPUX, Solaris, NT, BSD, and AIX. Due to its simplicity and elegance (go perl), it could be ported to virtually anything. Requires no proprietary hardware, and I like to think we give really good support. ;)

    Anyways, I'll stop selling it now. I just wanted to set the record straight. If you're in the North Carolina region, and you want to see us show our stuff off, we're giving a demo of RSF2 this Thursday night at the Triangle Area Lug meeting. Any further questions can be directed to spot@linuxpower.org or rob@starfiretechnology.com

    ~spot


  • The HA (High Availability) options for Linux is increasing in number, and I wonder just which one Motorola is going to use?

    Or are they going to roll their own HA?

    Anyway, HA-Linux from Motorola won't be here until May, so we'll see.

  • What's all the noise about. Putting up an embedded system has to be much more reliable by definition. You wouldn't/couldn't easily get to fix an embedded system otherwise so having a very very reliable core is an absoute necessity. Making one on Linux can only be a good thing as opposed to any of the other special purpose smokestacks used today like.....Java???? (uh maybe that's a bad analogy.)
  • Dork,

    HA is industry standard acronym for High Availability. I do not for a second belive that Motorola even considered VA Systems.
  • When you are a Telco or a Bank that's about acceptable. In some other areas of the global financial business you can not accept that much...
  • Now, I may not be a Math major but I do seem to remember a percentage being a relative number ;-)
    In other words 99.999% uptime means that over any time period (of significant length) the system must be available at least 99.999% of the time.
    Usually one meters this over a year (exept for Winslop where a day is a significant time :-)
    This means that you are allowed approximately 5 minutes downtime every year.
  • <I>I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price.</I>

    Don't forget accumulated downtime! If your local phone exchange is down 1/100 of the time (99%), then what about a long-distance international calls that goes through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of the same kind of equipment? You would never get through, because 2 of the 200 places would always be down on average.

    And they have stuff more important than ordinary phones using the same equipment: emergency lines to police and hospitals, the army use some capacity (at least in some countries). And don't forget the internet, you don't want to wait or get lots of unavailable sites.

  • Yeah, like we've really been waiting for Motorola to release software. Oh lookee, they're even releasing it for x86 in addition to their own chips. That's just brilliant.

    NOT!

    Hello, Motorola! Wake up! Repeat after me: "We will release the support chips and processors so that people can build POP machines and run this new Linux distro on Motorola hardware. We want to sell hardware, instead of releasing software to support our competitors' (Intel and AMD) sales." Now, repeat it again. And again. Good. Now, follow through, before I go postal!


    ---
  • And believe you me; there's a huge difference between 99.9% (just reboot and get back to work ) and 99.999%

    Yep, it's the difference between 9 hours downtime and 5 minutes downtime per year.

    Wish my ISP was like that...
  • I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos? I mean, the customer is more than willing to put up with delays and disconnects for a cheaper price. Already millions of people use cell phones which are have availability problems left and right. HA comes with a high price tag, I would like to see a telco offer second-rate service for a lower price on phone calls. I suppose that since you have to work with everyone else and can't really pick and choice your customers that you can't do this?
  • That's almost like plugging in an ISA card while the computer is compiling a kernel.

    Actually that would be perfectly safe if you could guarantee that all io pins were in low state.

    The danger with hotplugging is connecting an io-pin in high state before Vcc. This results in input protection diodes being turned on, effectively short-circuiting Vcc and ground.

  • They might possibly be running it at that. Probably they are only counting server OS uptime (as measured by 'w' or 'rup', i.e. time between reboots), not applications availability. It would be pretty hard for them to claim only 5 minutes downtime per year on user processes! Their httpd &/or incoming network link is probably swamped, regardless of the nature & state of the OS. See message below:

    ERROR
    The requested URL could not be retrieved

    ------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------

    While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.mcg.mot.com/linux

    The following error was encountered:

    Connection Failed
    The system returned:

    (0) Error 0
    This means that:

    The remote site or server may be busy or down. Please try again later.

    ------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------

    Generated by squid/1.1.22@dragon.ti.com

    #include "disclaim.h"
    "All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
  • I thought MetroWorks owned CodeWarrior?

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • umm..no. its also on regular intel hardware. see :
    http://www.henge.com/~alanr/ha/ [henge.com]....compactPCI cards can be hotswapped. in any hardware that supports it. and BTW, that CPU swapping is also because the CPUs are connected to the PCI bus.

  • Percentages are ratios, so it is 99.999% of whatever period you choose (in other words, the machine will only be broken one hundred-thousandth of any period of time).

    This guy chose one year, which is why he wrote "5 minutes per year". How did he he get to it, well:

    60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365.25 days per year = 525960 minutes in every year.

    The High Availablity Linux box will be broken one out of every 100,000 of those minutes, or 5 and quarter minutes per year.

    I sort of hope for your sake that you are in third grade...

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • you know with all the linux distros and the availability for PPC i may just invest in a G4... could be fun...

    ~Jester
  • So then you'd need to tell the equipment which lines to protect and which ones to ignore if they fail? That's quite impossible to do. Consider a card that serves 672 customers. What do you do when it fails? Chances are, one of those customers is going to be paying for POTS, not SPLAT service.. (Simple Plain Low Availability Telephone) So you have to protect that card!

    Alternately, you'd need to set up a 100%-separate system, built out of cheap unrpotected parts. Then when someone requests a change to cheap service, you incur labor when you move their jumper to the appropriate system. Not to mention the expense of installing the SPLAT system initially.

    By the way, as companies reorganize and merge, they dump their good people. This is a time-proven fact. Untrained people end up responsible for maintaining these systems, and things just don't go right. On condition of anonymity, I can quote an employee of the local telco:

    "The company can lie to the FCC, they can lie to the state regulatory board, they can lie to the customers. But they can't keep anything from their employees. We know what kind of service the company could be providing. Many of us have been around long enough to know how good it can be. Trust me, if the customers knew the kind of piss-poor service they're really getting, they'd be rioting outside company headquarters."
  • This leads me to conclude that soon, AMD and Intel will also have their very own operating systems.

    Now how are we ever going to get good benchmarking numbers?

    *grin*
  • They're legally required to offer full circuit availability for emergency calls as part of their licence.
  • Apple are highest in terms of dollars due to
    the high price of the PPC and associated chips.

    I'm sure Ford do score much higher in terms of volume.

    --
    pjk
  • Gentus did make it up almost two weeks back. Perhaps you should peruse 'Older stuff' once in a while, eh?
  • At least there's no mention of it in the document that I can find. Doing that is pretty hard, and would definitely require major surgery on thr Linux kernel.
  • You have to control everything a lot more than that to talk abbout 99.999% uptime - and that apparently was the goal, not going with the flow of already-existing distros.

    At the very least, you have to leave out netscape.
  • Check out uk.telecom for more info.
  • After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required.
    Actually this type of uptime was required BEFORE those machines crashed in England. Any machine in an SS7 network should be fully redundant. 20 minutes total downtime in a year (including upgrade time) isn't uncommon.
    My hunch is that those machines were SCPs (Service Control Points). They come in mated pairs, the outage meant that two out of the three mated pairs in England shit the bed (if my guess is correct). That is freakish to say the least. Does anyone have any real information from BT? It seems almost as cool as when AT&T shut down most of their east coast SCPs via a buggy software upgrade.
  • It's EXTREMELY hard to do, because upgrades, maintenance, and even failures all have to be handled without the software going down.

    Not to sound too uninformed -- but couldn't you simply have a cluster of machines and take one down in non-peak times to upgrade? I mean, how can you upgrade software without shutting it down at all? Doesn't seem possible to me!
  • Settle down there sparky. HA linux stands for High Availability... The term has been around for many a year, much longer than VA Linux has been.

    Now whether or not they should be naming their distro something so generic... like calling a version TCP Linux (because it run tcp networking), is something that is questionable.

  • Motorola also just announced that they got licensed the specs from the Symbian consortium (that's the guys who make the EPOC OS used in the Psion) for their new embedded processor, AND they're producing a new PPC chip for WinCE. That must be sweet - making processors for all 3 major PDA OS's, huh?

    "The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
  • Does this mean I can get LinuxPPC 2000 and patch it with Mot's code... then have a "HA Linux" distro? What sort of hardware does it need? Powerbase w/ G3 card? :-) -Ryan to the Z -Yup.
  • Are there plans by Motorola to help eventually merge their kernel patches into the linux kernel,or will this endup in the long feared fork of the kernel?

    Arun

  • Don't forget the Palm platform (and the Palm clones). IIRC, Palms are based on Motorola chips... I'd bet that there are quite a few $$$ being made off those.

    q


  • just in time for the US census.

    linux distros: 100 and counting

    users: 10 million+ and counting

    (Not that they'd probe for such important stuff :)
    ========================
    63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
    ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
  • ... then why did they put CodeWarrior 5 for Linux on hold? Motorola is a business. They do what they do in order to make money, not because they want to support your cute little "Linux Everywhere" utopian ideal. They developed this system because they thought it would make money for them. Presumably, CW5 for Linux is on hold because they don't think it will make money for them. There's a good chance they're right. Linux is a system developed by programmers for programmers, so there's a profusion of free development tools available. How many people do you think will actually buy CW5 for Linux? Not me - I somehow doubt it offers significant advantages over emacs+gcc+gdb.
  • As I remember the MPC555 it has a rather wimpy idea of memory management, more like 4 external memory regions/chip selects. And it doesn't directly support DRAM (the 8xx and 82xx lines do. It was really intended to run out of that 448K Flash and 26 K of internal static. I'd think you'd do better taking an 860 and outboarding the A/D D/A stuff.
  • MPC860,a PowerPC from Mot, not i860 from iNTEL.
  • Motorola now owns MetroWerks and has a last word on CodeWarrior releases, as it seems.
  • By your and everyone else on this thread's logic, Andover.Net would have to compete with another company called Andover.Com which comes into the market well after them selling the same goods and services. It does not work that way. Trademark law does not allow for name theft within the same market. And, yes, .com is an industry standard suffix and Andover is a geographical region the United States post office delivers to. What's your point again?
  • I still stand by my original assertion. VA has been around since '93 and HA has been around much longer as an acronym, but that does not mean Motorola can jump in and take a name which is so confusingly similar to an established company in the industry.

    I live in Vancouver, but that does not mean I will release a VAN Linux distro.
  • Cnet's News.com reported August 19 of last year: Motorola buys Metrowerks for $95 million [cnet.com]. The Metrowerks homepage [metrowerks.com] says:

    CodeWarrior
    Metrowerks
    A Motorola Company
  • Motorola doesn't run HA-Linux :(

    They should, considering their website is currently experiencing the slashdot effect.
  • And the ability to hot-swap parts starts putting Linux into the realm of a Solaris, which is what mission critical stuff usually runs on. I'm just curious what kernel version they're using.

  • Are you sure Apple is Motorola's biggest external customer?

    They make tons and tons of embedded chips for places like the Ford Motor Company, and I suspect Ford's volume (numerous chips per car) is significantly higher than Apple Computer.
  • For anyone with any backgroun in microcontrollers, this is like an HC11 on steroids.

    It does sound cool. But can you jumper it to come out of reset, initialize it's on-chip serial port, and wait for an .S10 file to be thrown at it over the serial port, then automatically program the contents of that file into flash?

    That's what is cool about the 'HC11 chip.

  • Re:This is excellent news! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it's great that the giant Motorola/Micro$oft techno-machine is about to come toppling down with the aid of one of the players! Does anybody have any info on Micro$oft'$ reaction?!

    Since when has there been a Motorola/MicroSoft techno-machine? Sure Motorola uses MicroSoft technology in some of their products (like most major technology companies), but they also support a number of competing technologies such as:

    Psion(symbian) - competes against Windows CE for PDA market
    MacOS X - Motorola's biggest external semiconductor customer is Apple
    Linux - supported for embedded applications

    While not on unfriendly terms with the folks in Redmond, Motorola is definitely not as tied to them as intel, AMD or any of the x86 chip makers!

  • New concept. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What a novel idea. A Linux distro with great up time.

    Oh shit, that's why I'm already running Linux.

  • Major Leauge (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the proof that Linux is ready for the major leauges. Telephone systems provided by a major company are running Linux with a promise of more than 99% uptime! This is very good news indeed. Next we will see companies (big ones, with name we all recognize) deciding to use it inhouse for their data processing applications. Not because it is less expensive but because it is best in class. The IS types will look at the Motorola release as proof that Linux is indeed "good enough" for them.
  • Hmmm. I suppose that's true. As viewed from Earth, Jupiter (or Saturn, in the book) -is- up. So, by definition, HAL's clockchip -is- an uptime. :)
  • There are a few reasons, the simplest is that they are generally selling a metered service and don't make any money during downtime. Depending on the bandwidth of the link, and the price of the service, this can be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute (this is especially true of under-sea cables: see Neal Stephenson's article Mother Earth, Mother Board [wired.com])

    Second, these are industries that are or have been highly regulated, and while overregulation breeds inefficiency, at least part of that inefficiency is overengineering.

    Finally, while Joe Average doesn't care too much about a busy signal for 5 minutes, big customers do and have quality of service and availability guarantees built into the contract. These customers will want to see that appropriate hardware is being used, since no matter how good the contract, it is unlikely to cover actual customer losses caused by an extended downtime, say for a financial institution.

    As you point out, however, it doesn't necessarily make sense to route all calls over this kind of network, which is why voice over IP is growing more popular. It is cheaper because there are less gaurantees for availability and quality of service.
    --
  • Most computer users don't know what HA really means, but I honestly don't blame them. It is a very specialized field, and to be completely honest, no desktop user really needs HA in any form or fashion.

    Agreed. HA solutions are mostly a matter of money. Specify your required amount of downtime, and then throw enough money at the problem until that target is reached. From the base level, you start by adding redundant storage, and move up, adding N+1 power, memory, processors etc., and then start into clusters with hot-spares and finally distributed clusters. By the time you're reaching that point, though, it's costing you a lot of money, and you have to weigh up whether the potential losses from downtime justify the amount you need to spend to guarantee the uptime.

    Of course, to do it properly, you need to have kernel support, and at the five nines level and above, probably hardware support as well. For most, though, a software-only solution will be more than adequate, and will provide a suitable balance between cost and reliability demands.

  • This could dangerous!

    Now that it has hot swapable CPUs you won't be able to shut it down when it goes psycho and kills everybody!

    What are you doing, Dave?
    I'm pulling your processors so you won't kill me!
    I'm sorry, Dave, but my HA Linux system allows me to hot swap CPUs - that won't save you, Dave...

    =tkk 8)

  • : just download the patch, patch the kernel, recompile it, reboot, and wala! You're done


    Except, unfortunately, that that's not the way the world always works with embedded stuff. Often embedded stuff will be on a system with no permanent storage, and most of the time no compiler/development environment. You may have a system that has 1-8 megs of ram, no hard drive, and a meg or so of flash. Redhat or debian *wouldn't* fscking fit on a good portion of the embedded systems out there. What you want is a kernel that works and that you can extend, and some additional functionality for downloading a new binary image to the board. Real men don't need files with programs in them.. they just link into the big honkin' image.

  • For some obscure reason, this sounds like an OS designed for men with vests and Harley-Davidsons...

  • Hot-Plug CPUs? Jesus, that's scary. I'd be afraid to do it, even if I had a Motorola technician walk me through it. It's just so...so WRONG.

    That's almost like plugging in an ISA card while the computer is compiling a kernel. *shiver* I actually pulled an ISA NIC card out of a running computer by accident once. The computer locked up, but I was astounded that after a reboot, everything worked fine (Including the NIC!)

    Next they're gonna tell me the machine supports direct-circuit contact Water Cooling. (RUN! ACK!)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • How do they handle this; do you have to take the CPU offline first, or does it survive a CPU crash?

    In other words, is it like Sun's servers where a CPU crash means a reboot, or like Reliant's servers where a CPU crash means a delay of a couple of milliseconds and a service call?

    I would think there would have to be hardware involved, not just software, for the latter.

  • They need their own distribution to maintain configuration control over the software. Any operating system that is expected to maintain 99.999% availability requires extensive testing and iron-clad configuration control. All changes must be justified, the new/modified code must be reviewed, tested and integrated into a new build. The new build must be extensively tested before it is released into production. Building fault-tolerant hardware is relatively easy. Getting the same reliability out of the software is much more difficult.
  • HA comes with a high price tag, I would like to see a telco offer second-rate service for a lower price on phone calls.

    Many American telephone companies are pioneering the provision of second-rate service. It's the bit about lower prices that they have trouble with.

  • You hit the nail on the head there... guess I hadn't given enough thought about what really a distribution for an embedded system means.

    However, I have to disagree on one thing. If you're doing an embedded system, then you should be doing your OWN distro... not use Motorola's... since an embedded system can have from 10Kb anywhere up to 128Mb flash memory... Motorola should only give the necessary guidelines to build an embedded Linux system... provide GPL'ed drivers, and leave the rest to them.
  • When did Morotola buy Metrowerks?

    LK
  • In the case of Motorola they were actually correct releasing completely separate distribution. Since this is very unique version of Linux it simply makes sense to package it differently. It would also make life easier for people who actually want to use since there is a lot less to worry about then it would be if they had to rebuild standard distribution.
  • COntrary to what many people have said, I think it is a good thing that hardware manufacturers are building their own distrobutions and kernels for Linux. Thinking that there ought to be a single Linux distro that should work on all systems equally well means it will work equally crappy on all systems. Every processor and chipset is a different beast and should have customized code to run it at its highest level of efficiency. A single kernel recompiled to run on different types of processors doesn't make alot of sense to me because some processors and chipsets behave so differently. What I would not like to see if the fragmentation that UNIX suffered between the versions the colleges were releasing and the versions Bell Labs continued to work on. There's already arguments about which is a better distro (which is two people arguing that the sky is blue), what isn't needed is different design philosophies.
  • Actually, the x86 version is Red Hat-based, while the PPC version is LinuxPPC-based. So, you can expect that any software running on either of those systems will work fine on the motorola distribution.
    I love seeing new, specialized Linux distributions which excel in their niches. What I hate is the "produce another general-purpose distro" idea, and I can't wait until some of them shake out.
    --JRZ
  • How is this any different than a Sun E10K or some Mainframes and Crays (amongst others) that support the ability to dynamically add/remove not only CPUs, but memory, and cards. Even most new Intel servers (and NT) support at least some ability to dynamically add/remove PCI cards.
  • As the news article states, Motorola plans to begin shipping HA Linux in May.
  • I think they were single machines, servicing different areas of the country. 2 went down, leaving one machine to service the whole country, which naturally struggled under the weight. It was as software problem in the other two machines, AFAIK, and the machines were down for many many hours.
  • Forgive me if I sound like a hopeless math luser, but how did you come to this number? 99.999% uptime tells me nothing. 99.999% of *what*? A year? A day? A nano-second?

    The number he arrived at was using the time period of a year.

    99.999% is rather general, but it's supposed to be. You want the product to spend 99.999% of the amount of time is trying to be used in a running state. If you're designing software that will only be run for an hour once a week, then spending that hour, even once, having the software not work will pretty much guarantee the software isn't 99.999% because of how long it takes to make up the downtime. How long? One hour of downtime required about 12 years of uptime to balance off.

    It's EXTREMELY hard to do, because upgrades, maintenance, and even failures all have to be handled without the software going down.
    ---
  • I wonder why HA is such a high concern for all telcos?
    Because telcos don't just carry mundane phone calls; they also carry critical calls like 911. Beyond that, they carry data circuits for ATMs and financial institutions and telemetry between hospitals. They carry the video feeds for security cameras and fire alarms. And they carry real-time flight data between air traffic control facilities. Those are situations where five nines is completely unacceptable. In environments like these, five minutes of scheduled downtime a year is planned four months in advance. Five-nines systems are clustered together in groups of three.

    I work on a database application which catalogs circuit designs for an RBOC's 911 and FAA circuits; some of these systems are so important their data is routed over four redundant trunk groups--you can have three simultaneous circuit failures and the data will still get through. If it doesn't, well, in an air traffic corridor where planes less than a mile apart are closing on each other at over a thousand miles an hour, five minutes without radar data is an amazingly long period of time, odd/even thousands be damned.

    Telephone switches themselves are astonishingly robust pieces of equipment, as has been pointed out above. They are designed to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections and dynamically shunt traffic from overloaded or unavailable trunk groups. If a switch crashes, which happens once every three or four years, it can reboot within twelve seconds and existing calls aren't interrupted. New attempts made during those seven seconds are quietly rerouted somewhere else (sometimes during the last second of boot it just pretends to be ringing the line) and you'd never know the thing went down.

    It ain't just phone calls; it's stuff where five minutes of down time could cause a catastrophe.

    --

  • HA Linux provides - Hot pluggable CPUs!

    Whoo hoo! Hot swappable CPUs! Here goes!

    # umount-eject /proc

  • This equates to about 5 minutes of downtime a year, which is not too bad.

    Just for the curious, :)

    --
  • This craziness needs to stop!!

    Now, I think it is great that Linux is coming out all over the place and runs on just about every CPU and architecture out there. However, all of these variant distro's are going to create serious impact on software development.

    We see everyday on Freshmeat that this package or that package has been fixed to work with "Insert Distro Here". There is a fix for Debian this day, Red Hat on another, Slackware later on the second day. Talk about a nightmare for anyone who creates an app with a moderate amount of interest.

    ---
    Just my 2 cents. Oh wait, my thoughts ain't worth even that much in the end.
  • The Motorola page is down now (slashdotted), but when I saw it a second ago, it looked like they were pushing *TWO* different distros. One distro was three-nines availability for embedded equipment, and the other was 5-nines availability for HA equipment.
  • Well, you can get the EGCS/Gnu tools with the CodeWarrior IDE for Linux [devdepot.com] from Metrowerks. Annoyingly, there are separate Red Hat and SuSE versions.
  • I'd like to see the source code for this High Availability distro, to difference against others. Can't find it on their web site, after some looking. They have some downloads, but they're just patches for PCI bus support.

  • ... then why did they put CodeWarrior 5 for Linux on hold?

    Sure, their distro is for the embedded market and CodeWarrior is for the desktop, but Linux is Linux..

  • Ordinarily, I'd agree, *BUT..

    This is a very hardware based solution, and hence, requires a very specific distro for it. This isn't for running Wordperfect and Quake III. This is high availability. Granted, if they stuck with a given distro's standards, that be nice, but this is a VERY specific solution..

  • The article is slashdotted... (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Monday March 06, 2000 @09:34AM (#1222009) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know if Motorola's HA support uses the Open Source HA code that's been developed, or are they using their own?

    Secondly, how usable is their HA code? I know that Sun's HA code is buggy and phenominally unreliable to the point of being completely useless.

    Lastly, what (if any) code of their own are they going to release?

  • I remember when people touted making your own distrobution as an advantage of linux. Whatever happened to that 'if you don't like it, roll your own' philosophy?

  • We need a linux platform now more than ever ! (Score:3)

    by loom ( 35551 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @11:00AM (#1222011)
    With major hardware makers, software companies wanting to release their own distributions, I think we should really call again for a linux "standard" distribution, in order to make things such as Oracle distributions possible.

    Otherwise we risk to go the way of the UNIX's splits, where basically each UNIX is it's own platform, and this is going to scare people off real quick.

    I'm all for innovation and stuff, but not at the cost of loosing my favorite current platform. This is why I think SGI did the right thing by creating a Linux Powerpack that comes on top of a Redhat distribution. It's less work for them (they don't have to take care of the whole distribution) and it's more reassuring for the users and the software makers that don't have to worry too much about yet another distribution.
  • maybe you should look harder. the source code for hot swapping linux kernel mods are available here (http://www.mcg.mot.com/cfm/templates/swDetails.cf m?PageID=704&SoftwareID=6) [mot.com] ...they also give it out on cdrom.

  • Ahh, another telco geek! (Score:3)

    by Myself ( 57572 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @11:40AM (#1222013) Journal
    Hey, I've hot-plugged ISA cards before.. Just make sure no software is expecting to use it, the IRQ is clear, engage the ground contacts first, and cross your fingers.

    It really freaks PC people out when you yank cards out of a working system, doesn't it? During the course of testing a system, we beat on the chassis and cards with our fists, wiggle and pull on the connectors, bodycheck the entire bay of equipment, pull each card, reset the processor, interrupt any signals that are supposed to be protected, and if at any time traffic fails for more than 50ms, we have to go back and figure out what went wrong. Computer users just don't understand it.

    It's difficult, to say the least, to get people to understand that when we apply power to something, it never goes down, for any reason, until it's obsolete and ready to be removed.

    Do you have an example, or some good way of explaining this sort of stuff to people outside the industry? I seem to get blank stares when I describe telco availability standards to PC people.

  • I can see the ads now:"aHA!", "HA HA" or "HALinux" (Score:3)

    by normd ( 116434 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @11:16AM (#1222014)
    Sorry I don't have anything serious to add to this discussion. But how about some possible advertisements for HA Linux:

    "Argh! The Blue Screen of Death again! Where can I get an OS with 99.999% uptime? aHA! HA Linux."

    Or

    "Laugh at the competition: HA HA HA. Use HA Linux."

    Or

    "After seeing 2001 Space Odyssey: So that's what H.A.L. stands for: High Availability Linux"

    Now back to your regular scheduled posts.

    ************************************************ *
    "I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when
    I had put the last touches to it, I discovered
    that it was orthodoxy." G.K. Chesterton in
    Orthodoxy
    ************************************************ *

  • Enough already! (Score:4)

    by mjuarez ( 12463 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @09:30AM (#1222015)
    I know this may be moderated down, supposedly
    because it's "redundant", but it's something that has to be known.

    All right, Motorola does their own distro...
    is it Debian, or RedHat based? Or none of those?
    What will happen if you want to work with embedded controllers, using Motorola chips, but don't want to use their own distro? Will you lose technical support?

    IMHO, I think hardware manufacturers should just test distros that work correctly with their hardware, issue a hardware driver patch to the kernel so Alan and his gang can merge it into the general kernel, and be done with it. That way, in case anyone is using another XYZ distro and wants to work with Motorola embedded chips, Motorola simply says "Just patch the kernel... the patch is available right here!" And, if they don't know how to do that, they shouldn't be programming an embedded controller, for christ sakes!

    Hardware manufacturers should NOT create their own distros... I repeat... Hardware manufacturers should NOT create their own distros... just release a kernel patch, binary driver module, or
    whatever is best for them. It's the best solution
    for them (they don't have to manage their own distro), and for everybody else (just download the patch, patch the kernel, recompile it, reboot, and wala! You're done)

    If I hurt somebody's feelings, sorry... had to calm down my temper. :)

  • In another move... (Score:4)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:35AM (#1222016) Homepage Journal
    theonion.com release Ha-Ha Linux, just because they could.

    --

  • Re:Argh! Too many Linuxen (Score:4)

    by sholton ( 85051 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @09:38AM (#1222017)
    Hot-Plug CPUs? Jesus, that's scary. I'd be afraid to do it, even if I had a Motorola technician walk me through it. It's just so...so WRONG.

    No, this is just so COOL, if you've ever watched it done.

    This is a mandatory test for TELCO equipment; yank the ACTIVE processor card out of it's slot and make sure the inactive side took over, and correctly noted the event. That's with an 80% of maximum traffic load applied.

    When you're dealing with ENTERPRISE class equipment and service levels, you don't reboot even to upgrade the kernel. It stays live all the time. Probably make a killer e-commerce (or portal) server, as well. ;-)

    In the TELCO environment, 99.999% uptime means just that. Too much time outside of normal operation and you're writing inch-thick reports to the FCC.

    And believe you me; there's a huge difference between 99.9% (just reboot and get back to work ) and 99.999%

  • Re:Enough already! (Score:5)

    by garver ( 30881 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @10:37AM (#1222018)

    So, as an embedded systems developer and in your perfect world, I should get a RedHat CD and some binaries/code from Motorola, throw them together, shake vigorously, cram them into flash, then boot? Uh huh. Sounds like pain to me. In fact, I'm sure some nice person would come along, do it, and post the results so that everyone else doesn't have to go through the pain. Whoops, thats a distro!

    A beauty of Linux is that tens, hundreds, even thousands of distros can pop up, giving me all the choices I want. If I want a workstation with X/GNOME and some nice Office apps, I install one distro. If I want a server, optimized for IP performance, I install another. If I'm building a smart toaster, I get another. Someone else does the work and shares it.

    In addition, unlimited distros means that we can more easily try out new stuff, not just new versions of gcc or glibc. They might try different install, package management, library management, personalities, etc. One might even come up with an alternative to X-windows, this would never happen if we were all using the same distros that had to maintain backwards compatibility. The best survive and go on, its evolution, baby. You build the better distro by allowing mutations to pop up and letting the population decide which is best. BTW, best may mean one that follows the LSB best, etc.

    The alternative is to be limited to only a handful of versions and we all bitch how they don't meet our needs and how we wished we could do it ourselves. You might as well go back to Windows.

  • Repeat after me (Score:5)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @11:39AM (#1222019)
    Hardware manufacturers should not create their own PROPRIETARY distributions. Hardware manufacturers should not create their own PROPRIETARY distributions. If the modifications are appropriately gpled, and later merged into other distributions, then great! Motorola, however, can't wait around while other companies (which may have interests opposed to Motorola's -- these things happen) kowtow to Motorola's demands and release what Motorola wants to exist right now. Hopefully these modifications will make it into the general kernel, but one of the chief (for businesses) benefits of GPLed software is they don't have to wait around for the OS manufacturer (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) to do what needs to be done now.

    You make it seem like managing one's own distro is harder than trying to manage someone else's distro. You also make it seem like achieving these levels of uptime is just a matter of inserting a new driver. I'd suggest otherwise in this particular case.

    And using reverse psychology like yours on moderators, while effective, is beneath my contempt. No need (+1 Insightful) to insert (+1 Informative) subliminal messages (+1 Funny) in my posts. No sir-ee.

  • version 9000 has incredible uptime features (Score:5)

    by georgeha ( 43752 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @09:03AM (#1222020) Homepage
    Version 9000 of High Availability Linux has soem incredible uptime features.

    HAL-9000# shutdown -r now
    I'm sorry root, I can't do that.

    George

  • Argh! Too many Linuxen (Score:5)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Monday March 06, 2000 @08:45AM (#1222021) Journal
    Getting past the obvious posts such as: "Where is the source code" and other stuff...

    HA Linux provides:

    • Hot pluggable CPUs!
    • Hot pluggable fans, IO and power modules
    • SNMP support
    • Inter system communications

      • And this Linux seems destined for the telco market, designed to run in telecom systems that require major high uptime (carrier grade networking etc). After 2 or the 3 computers that service 0800 and 0845 etc numbers in the UK crashed at the same time a couple of weeks ago, this uptime is required.

  • I've been waiting for this... TTC [ttc.com] has been using Solaris in their Centest offerings for a while, and their TestPad 2000 series products actually run DOS and Windows(!). These are only test instruments, so their accuracy and ease of use are more important than uptime; customer traffic isn't affected.

    Nortel [nortel.ca] runs HP-UX in some of their transport equipment, but again it's a non-service-affecting application. Failure of the overhead processor means that performance monitoring and protection switching are lost, but it doesn't immediately affect traffic. I don't know what the DMS-series switches run at the core, but the user interface looks the same as on their TransportNodes.

    Tellabs [tellabs.com] runs their Titan series cross-connect systems on PowerPC processors. As in the Nortel equipment, the traffic itself is carried on dumb electronics; loss of the processor only affects fault recovery, system provisioning, and performance monitoring.

    So far, nobody's using Linux for mission-critical stuff, processing customer calls in real-time. This is probably about to change! Slashdot readers know that Linux is more stable than the average desktop OS. But most people don't realize the extreme requirements of the telecom industry.

    For instance: When a tornado ripped the roof off [americasnetwork.com] a central office and half the switch was soaked, the parts which weren't physically destroyed by water kept running.

    This is an industry where there's (hopefully) no such thing as downtime. I've been in offices where data circuits have been functioning continuously since before I was born. A few bit errors here and there due to the occasional lightning strike, but no real interruptions. From the switches that actually handle your calls, to the transport systems that move data from one office to another, everything has backups. Commercial power fails? No problem, the office runs on batteries anyway. They go from charging to discharging, and you've got 12 hours to get the diesel generator running in case it doesn't start itself. After that, you've got a week's worth of fuel in an underground tank. Let's say some knucklehead throws a wrench into a power board. Instant pinkslip, but the customers never know, because everything has two power feeds. Down to the individual card level, every circuit in a piece of telcom equipment has a backup that takes over in the event of a failure.

    In the PC world, RAID comes close to this level of reliability in terms of a drive failure, but how many of them can give you access to your data even if a controller or bus fails?

    Is your desktop box ready for this?

    HA Linux IS a significant development. I haven't had a chance to check out the specs yet, (Slashdotted -- how's that for availability?) but from the quick blurb here, I can say that this will seriously change some things in the carrier market. Your ESS or DMS or EWSD might not run Linux any time soon, but some enormous routers and call-processing systems might.

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