Turbolinux to Deliver 2.6 Kernel in 10 Server

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Japanese commercial Linux distributor Turbolinux becomes the second of the third of the major Linux players to announce its server variant based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. While Turbolinux will be third when it comes to announcing, it will get its software to market in Japan before the end of the month and worldwide by early December, behind Novell and well ahead of industry juggernaut Red Hat.

Turbolinux 10 Server, or 10S as it is called, is based on the Linux 2.6.8 kernel, which is the latest stable release of the constantly evolving kernel. 10S is the kicker to Turbolinux 8 Server, which was based on the UnitedLinux variant of the Linux 2.4 kernel that Turbolinux, SuSE (prior to its acquisition by Novell), and the Caldera (prior to its acquisition of and name change to the SCO Group) worked on together and launched in late 2002. (Soon thereafter, SCO sued IBM for allegedly putting Unix intellectual property into Linux and the UnitedLinux partnership dissolved.)

Turbolinux is touting the same features of Linux 2.6 that all of the other players are talking about, namely the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL) support that can significantly speed up multithreaded applications such as relational databases and Java applications (including Java-based Web application servers and other middleware). While Turbolinux 10S supports NPTL, it also supports the prior threading model, which means applications tuned for Linux 2.4 do not have to be recompiled to run. The updated Linux operating system will also support the Security-Enhanced Linux (SE-Linux) adaptations to the kernel that allow it to be used in security-sensitive environments, such as in military systems. Turbolinux has created its own SE-Linux administration tools, called TurboTools, to manage security on the server as well as to interface with a 90-day trial version of Trend Micro's ServerProtect for Linux antivirus software.

Turbolinux 10S also supports the selectable I/O scheduler, which scales up and down to match the performance requirements of the SMP servers on which the software runs. Moreover, Turbolinux 10S supports asynchronous I/O, which allows jobs with heavy disk I/O (such as databases and intensive file serving) to run faster than was possible with Linux 2.4. The updated Linux platform support the open source Logical Volume Manager 2 volume manager, which allows online sizing of volumes. The ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS journaling file systems are also supported.

Linux 2.6 includes a new CPU scheduler that radically improves the performance of SMP servers, and Turbolinux says that its software will scale to 32-way processing with the NUMA clustering technologies that come through the new kernel. The software can address up to 64 GB of main memory--which is not a lot for a 32-way server running a 64-bit operating system, but it is probably more than most real-world customers need--and several terabytes of disk capacity. Turbolinux says that the software supports the new Intel i915 and i925 chipsets, Serial ATA disks and controllers, PCI Express peripherals, and InfiniBand and Fibre Channel adapters.

Turbolinux says that 10S is aimed at midrange customers, enterprise customers with big Linux boxes, and any customer that wants to support either Web application middleware or an SE-Linux secure environment. (What that means is that it is not an entry Linux offering.) Turbolinux 10S will be available in Japan starting October 29, and throughput the rest of the world on December 3. A base license with 90 days of installation support costs $360. A license with one year of installation and configuration support costs $890. A special developer edition will sell for $89. All versions include five year's worth of maintenance updates in their prices.