LinuxWorld Preview: More Ardor, More Products

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The spring LinuxWorld expo gets underway in Boston this week. With the Linux community more vibrant than ever and out there making open source waves in the IT world, and with commercialized Linux products representing one of the few high-growth areas in the IT market, it is a safe bet that LinuxWorld is going to be a veritable explosion of products, promises, and polemics. Not everybody can go to the show, however, which is why subscribing to The Linux Beacon comes in handy.

The main event, product-wise, will be Red Hat's expected debut of its Enterprise Linux 4 release for desktops, workstations, and servers. This update to Red Hat's platform brings its offerings to full parity with the Linux 2.6 kernel. Enterprise Linux 3, which started shipping almost two years ago, took many of the features from Linux 2.6 and back-ported them to the Linux 2.4 kernel. However, not all of the features could be backported, such as the block I/O layer from Linux 2.6, which significantly improves server performance. Enterprise Linux 4 will have the Security-Enhanced Linux security extensions to Linux available as an option, allowing Red Hat to push Linux into sensitive areas where high security is of paramount importance. (To find out more about the features in Enterprise Linux 4, see "Red Hat Betas Enterprise Linux 4," from the October 5, 2004, issue of this newsletter.) I will provide an in-depth review of Enterprise Linux 4 once Red Hat actually announces it this week.

The other big announcements at the show are expected to come from IBM and Hewlett-Packard, two of the most ardent supporters of Linux in the server space these days.

IBM will be rolling out a new toolset for its independent software developer partners called Chiphopper, which allows companies to more easily code applications that run across the X86, Itanium, and Power processors used in IBM's own eServer products, which include the xSeries Xeon, Opteron, and Itanium severs; the iSeries and pSeries Power servers; and the zSeries mainframe servers. According to Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide Linux at IBM, the company's software engineers have been working with Novell and Red Hat to come up with a way to make it easier to make Linux applications that adhere to the Linux Standards Base 2.0 specification and can run on Red Hat or Novell Linuxes on any of IBM's eServer platforms.

The idea behind Chiphopper is to give IBM's ISV partners a tool that lets them know that their code is LSB 2.0 compliant and also tell them where they make use of special hardware features in different X86, Itanium, Power, or mainframe platforms. With such a tool, ISVs can eventually create a single set of source code that can be compiled across all the different platforms, much as Red Hat and Novell do with their own commercial Linux distributions.

Handy says that IBM has about 37 percent revenue share in the Linux server business, ahead of HP's 23 percent and Dell's 14 percent, and that one of the reasons why this is true is that it sells Linux on Power and mainframe platforms, which account for about 40 percent of its sales. To Handy's way of thinking, a tool like Chiphopper can help ISVs who have traditionally focused just in X86 servers to chase another 40 percent of incremental revenue on Power and mainframe servers. IBM has identified about 6,000 X86 Linux applications certified on the xSeries platform, and says that there are about 1,000 Power-Linux applications certified on the iSeries and pSeries. With Chiphopper, IBM wants to help double the number of xSeries-Linux applications to 12,000 and then work to get as many ported to the Power and mainframe platforms as possible. Handy says that IBM has been piloting the program with 24 ISVs.

The Chiphopper tool includes the LSB 2.0 App Check tool, for ensuring compliance to that spec; a tool called Hopscotch, created by IBM, that looks for chip-specific function calls in the code; as well as a "Ready for eServer" logo program that ISVs want. IBM is also offering ISVs free access to eServer platforms for application testing as well as co-marketing and sales coverage benefits to those participating in the Chiphopper program. Perhaps most significant, IBM is offering ISVs free post-production tech support for the code they port using Chiphopper.

HP is expected to trumpet the fact that is has Linux 2.6 scaling all the way across its 64-way Itanium-based Integrity server line. Last August, the Integrity was tweaked to run Linux 2.6 from Novell (as embodied in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9) within nPar hardware partitions on the servers. Those partitions were only able to scale across two cell boards, or an eight-way SMP slice. With this week's announcements, says Efrain Rovira, director of marketing for Linux and open source at HP, Linux can now be the sole operating system on even the biggest 64-way Integrity machine.

While Rovira did not want to divulge exactly how HP is doing this, he did say that the company is using a standard Linux kernel to scale that far, not gutting the kernel, as some vendors have had to do. For instance, Silicon Graphics will run a single instance of its SGI Advanced Linux Environment across the shared memory system in its Altix Itanium-based servers, which can have as many as 2,048 Itanium processors sharing a chunk of memory. But to do so requires a modified version of the Linux kernel; in SGI's case, this is a modified version of the Red Hat Linux 3 kernel. HP has created what is presumably some microcode tweaks called BigTux, which allow certain kinds of high-performance-computing workloads (such as the STREAM and HPL benchmarks) to scale uniformly across one to 16 of the four-way cell boards in the Integrity. Presumably such scaling is also possible on NUMA-aware commercial workloads, such as Oracle's 10g database.

In addition to this announcement, HP is expected to announce that Linux 2.6 distributions from Red Hat and Novell can be included in MC ServiceGuard high availability clusters; the company has been supporting Linux 2.4 and HP-UX Unix until now. HP is also adding its BladeSystems running Linux to its Linux Reference Architectures, which are software stacks that are preconfigured to run on HP ProLiant (Xeon- and Opteron-based) and Integrity (Itanium-based) servers. Rovira says that, by the end of 2005, the company expects that about half of its blade server shipments will be sold with Linux; sales are dominated by Windows at the moment, but the broadening and deepening of application support for Linux (particularly a Linux-MySQL-JBoss stack with full HP support) is making Linux more attractive to HP's commercial customers.

Rovira also said that HP has been making contributions to the open-source Xen virtual machine partitioning project, and will be kicking up its support for the project with code, donated through the GPL, to help better manage and secure Xeon partitions. (I'll have more on this in next week's issue after I talk to HP Labs.)

IBM Research is also quietly contributing to the Xen project, as we reported several weeks ago. IBM's techies had apparently developed a security architecture for hypervisors (called sHype, for the company's own X86-based hypervisor). IBM is not releasing its own partitioning for X86 machines, but is contributing sHype to Xen. The company was expected to make some announcements about Xen at LinuxWorld, but at the last minute it appears to have changed its mind.