Linux Foundation Weblogs

Ted Tso: Ext4 is now the primary filesystem on my laptop

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:06:33 +0000

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem. So far so good! So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet. I will be doing backups a bit more frequently until I’m absolutely sure things are rock solid, though!

I am using the latest ext4 patches and the tip of the e2fsprogs git repository. Hopefully when we get the bulk of the patches merged into the mainline kernel after the 2.6.26 ships and the 2.6.27 merge window opens, and after I ship out e2fsprogs 1.41 (I have one work-in-progress pre-release, with another coming soon), it’ll be ready for much more wide-spread testing.

In addition to the excellent crew of ext4 developers, I’d like to call out for special thanks Gary Howco and Holger Kiehl, two early users/benchmarkers of ext4 who tried our latest code, and reported bugs that had previously escaped attention by developers (who had been mostly testing the code via the same old test suites); their additional workloads and benchmarks flushed out a few additional bugs. Thanks, guys!!

Hopefully after a few weeks of my using ext4 for real-live work, I’ll find a few last few bugs to be fixed, and/or feel much more confident it’s ready for me to recommend to others for their production data.

Linux Weather Forecast: 2.6.26: almost there

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:27:28 +0000

I fell a little behind on the weather forecast pages, sorry for that. I plead that I was vacationing with the in-laws and would have gotten into serious trouble had I gone too near a keyboard. Anyway, things are caught up now.

The current prepatch is 2.6.26-rc8; when he posted it, Linus said that it might just be the last one. Given that this development cycle is smaller (in terms of the amount of code merged), I had thought that it would come together a little quicker; thus the “late June” prediction which had appeared on the forecast pages. Well, it’s late June, and we’re not there yet. More worryingly, the length of the regression list is about the same as it has been for the last month or so. My guess is that there will be an -rc9 before it’s all done, but I’ve been wrong before.

I added a few entries to the pages while I was there. HP donated AdvFS, which is a welcome body of code even if it will never be shipped in the mainline kernel in anything close to its current form. The GEM memory manager is interesting: it looks like it will displace TTM as the presumptive memory management code for 3D graphical processing units. That’s a classic example of how the kernel development process can work: TTM embodies a great deal of work, but that work can be quickly pushed aside if somebody comes up with a better way to get things done. This can be hard on individual developers, but it’s good for the resulting kernel. Finally, I couldn’t resist putting in a thing about the BKL-removal work, which is a project I’ve somehow gotten pulled into.

Look for more change once the 2.6.27 merge window opens. I’ll be cleaning out a bunch of older stuff then as well.

Andy Updegrove: How “Ignorant of Standards” was Microsoft Really?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:20:40 +0000

Regular readers will notice that I’ve been woefully silent the last few weeks, at first due to having too many irons in the fire, and for the last ten days due to being on a family vacation abroad, returning not till July 2. As a result, I’ve been not only behind on blogging, but also on keeping up with the news while limited primarily to Blackberry access since I left. But I thought that it might be useful to take a break and share the “Huh?!?” I experienced when I stumbled across this article by Andrew Donoghue at ZDNet while briefly enjoying an island of laptop connectivity in a hotel lobby in Florence. The article is titled, “Microsoft admits to standards ignorance pre-OOMXL” and is based on remarks by Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee. Even more incredibly, it bears the following subtitle:

Microsoft has admitted that, despite being one of the dominant names in IT for over 30 years, it had little or no experience or expertise around software standards until the company was mid-way through the process of getting Office Open XML approved by the International Organization for Standardization.

Why “Huh?” Because Microsoft has been playing the standards game, butting heads over prior technologies such as ActiveX, Java and much, much more with the best of them for decades as a member of hundreds of standards organizations. Moreover, it has held many board seats along the way, and has had a staff of attorneys for some time dedicated to standards matters. That staff includes the former General Counsel of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Still, while McKee has over-spun the point by a few hundred RPMs, there is an important point to be made on the subject of Microsoft’s standards-related capabilities, as I’ll explain in greater detail below.

Read the rest

Jim Zemlin: Nokia Launches a Full Scale War for the Mobile OS

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:12:57 +0000

It has been years since we have seen a full scale operating system war. Today’s announcement by Nokia that they will be open sourcing Symbian and making it available royalty free is the opening of yet another front in the blossoming mobile OS conflagration.

Mobile computing is a complex market with intricate relationships between the mobile carriers, device manufacturers, regulators, and their various suppliers. The best way to think about this is to see its similarity to the early days of the personal computer. In fact, mobile devices are getting to look a lot more like personal computers every day as Moore’s law continues to drive down the size and price of mobile device components while increasing their power. Most of today’s low end smart phones are far more powerful than a laptop from even just a few years ago. Think about a device that is priced at $199, has a web browser, e-mail client, word processor, calendar, video, audio, camera, etc. Sounds a heck of a lot like a laptop only it is cheaper and fits in your pocket.

So who are the early winners and losers in this war? More importantly how does today’s announcement impact other Linux mobile platform efforts out there such the Google’s Android, the Limo Foundation, ACCESS, and others? Finally how will this impact the proprietary hold outs in the mobile computing world such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry OS, and Microsoft Mobile? Answering these questions requires a little bit of history.

History repeats.

Just like the early days of the PC, we are seeing a scramble from a variety of operating system vendors to become the mobile platform of the future. Back then it was PC/DOS, MS/DOS, Apple, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, IBM. OS/2. The winner of that war was clearly Microsoft and the reward was greater than anyone could have imagined. At around the same time we saw the Unix Wars with Sun, IBM, Novell, HP, DEC, Silicon Graphics and others all forming various “open” alliances (sound familiar?) such as the Open Software Foundation, Unix International, the Open Group and others which ended in Sun dominating the Unix market, the SCO Group descending into oblivion and Linux eating the Unix markets lunch. In server computing two winners are emerging from that war: Linux and once again Microsoft.

What is each side competing for?

Developer mind share. Becoming the defacto application development platform for mobile is the goal here. The more applications that are available on a phone platform the more interesting things you can do with it. With applications you can automate your sales force, track your friends locations, calculate currency rates, keep up with people on facebook, listen to music, watch a movie, etc. The more applications on a platform, the more people want to use it, the more people who use a platform, the more developers want to build applications for that expanding market, and so on and so forth. For Microsoft winning the PC war enabled them to become the defacto application platform for desktop computing locking users who had applications that only ran on Windows into their platform for years.

Wars generally produce one or two winners

Have you ever played three way tennis? It doesn’t work very well because eventually two players gang up on the third and eliminate him or her from the game. This is the basic rule of alliances; when the stakes are big enough alliances are formed in order to eliminate other players from the game. This is going on in the mobile industry right now. All the players know that they must form alliances out of necessity. Competing firms generally don’t join together unless they have to do it. When a rival threatens to dominate the world and lock others out often firms will join together to combat this threat. Combinations of alliances ebb and flow until the market reaches a reasonable equilibrium or until a single winner takes all.

Who are the players? How does this impact them?

Microsoft: Windows mobile has large and growing market share in the smart phone world. They got there by providing a experience on a mobile device similar to the one people are comfortable with on their desktop PC. Which means they leveraged their desktop monopoly in order to attempt to dominate the mobile computing world. This is their sole advantage in this war. Their problem is that they are using an outdated development model which requires a massive internal R&D effort, slows innovation, and requires every other player in the industry to pay licensing fees to Microsoft. Simply put; this boat is not going to float for long. In the cut throat, low margin, high volume world of mobile computing, device makers are simply not going to cede the high margin software business to Microsoft. Companies like Motorola, Samsung, LG, NEC, Panasonic, Nokia and others have their own brands and their own ambitions. In that context today’s announcement comes as a big blow to Microsoft as their only other major proprietary platform competitor has just announced they are reducing their license fees to zero and open sourcing their code. Ouch.

Apple iPhone: Apple produces a niche operating system on a single device with a very closed model. They do it extremely well. Their innovation and cutting edge consumer electronic design is unparalleled. However, by creating a closed platform Apple is repeating history by engaging in the exact same tactics that caused it to lose the PC wars. They may have a short term lead amongst a group of consumers who are will to pay a lot for elegant design and cutting edge technology, but sustaining this against a more open ecosystem is not a long term strategy for success. Nokia acknowledged this today. At the end of the day Apple is becoming more of a services company offering music and entertainment for a fee, something Nokia openly acknowledges they want to become as well and is certainly Google’s motivation behind Android. Which is yet another battlefront.

RIM: See Apple without the services.

Linux: Google Android, Limo, et. al. Now that Symbian will be open and royalty free one of the advantages that Linux had over that platform is gone. The only other advantage Symbian had was a large installed base and that will continue to serve them for some time. However, there continue to be some fundamental disadvantages relative to Linux that Symbian must deal with. First is their large installed base. While it has it advantages, it also locks Symbian platform development into the obsolete API’s that were developed for devices with obsolete form factors and significant performance limitations. Think of all the problems Microsoft has had with Vista and XP compatibility. Symbian also fails to benefit from sharing a code base across the entire pantheon of computing. Linux shares development with embedded systems, desktop devices, super computing and server side computing. Efforts to reduce power consumption in a large data center will benefit battery life on Linux mobile devices. Nokia has now put the Linux mobile community on notice that it needs to rapidly produce the development tools and testing infrastructure that will enable the creation of an ISV ecosystem. Expect both Android and the Limo Foundation to meet that challenge quickly. Finally, Linux supports more device components than any other platform in the market. One can simply walk down the streets of Guangzhou and assemble a Linux based device with almost any set of commodity components.

Waiting in the wings: Abobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight, Java Mobile, Google Widgets, and the web browser. These development platforms lie one layer up from the operating system and seek to abstract away the relevance of the underlying operating system. Why write an application for Windows, Symbian or the iPhone when I can simply write an application in Adobe air and it will run across all three.

The hope: Open Systems

Today’s announcement is further acknowledgment that the future of computing is one of collective innovation. It is testimony to the fact that while the old model of hiring the best people, locking them away in a lab, and zealously guarding your code may have worked before but that long term it simply is not going to work. The hope is that a mobile platform can be developed and offered by multiple vendors with application compatibility across their competing devices. In this world the consumer wins by being able to get the most innovative device from a variety of competitors without losing their application investment if they want to switch. To do this will require five things: open source reference software (ie; Linux and Symbian), an open standard which defines a mobile platform, a set of tests that device vendors can use to insure the operating system they use is compatible with the standard, a set of developer tools that make it simple for new applications to be created for the platform, and a trademark indicating compliance with the platform “Built on Android” or “Powered by Symbian.” It appears the industry may have the will to do this.

Nokia should be lauded for its step in the right direction. It should also be noted that Nokia has its feet firmly planted in both the Linux and Symbian camps as members of the Linux Foundation, the Limo Foundation and creators of the N Series Mobile Linux device.

Ted Tso: Learning how to communicate

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:15:49 +0000

Pity poor Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. He gave a talk at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, where according to ZDnet, he lectured Open Source Developers that they needed to learn why DRM and other closed technologies were necessary, because of business issues such as subsidized (device) business models. I suspect he wasn’t prepared for the reaction, which took the form of a major fuss on Slashdot, as well as some declarations from a few people on the maemo-users mailing lists that they would never buy another Nokia device. Dr Jaaski then posted today on his blog an entry entitled, “Some learning to do?”, where he stated that while Nokia needs to learn how the open source world works (not just licenses and legal issues, but also the spirit), that the open source world also needed to learn as well — about WHY things are the way they are. He ended the post with “I’m not a teacher, I’m a learner” — which is fair enough.

I actually think that Dr. Jaaksi is right; we all should be interested in learning, and having talked with a number of Nokia employees, I can testify that their hearts are very much in the right place, and there are some strong reasons regarding the demands of carriers, the subsidized business model of handsets in the US, the attitudes of suppliers for components in mobile devices, that very much tie their hands — as well the hands of every other handset company out there. Progress in this space will come slowly, and but I believe there is hope that in the long run things will get better.

However, at the same time, I would suggest to Dr. Jaaksi that it’s also important how to communicate with the open source community — or with any community that holds views sometimes with great passion. Many people do not react well to being told that they need to learn something — even if it is true that they do. Admitting that they need to learn is for some people tantamount to admitting ignorance, or even worse admitting stupidity, and so they are loath to do this. Telling them this just makes them defensive and angry.

My suggestion for how get people to learn without making them defensive is to use a modified Socratic method. It works especially well with the Open Source crowd, because many of them are engineers, and engineers are by nature problem solvers. So if you give them a problem to solve, they will go to work trying to find potential solutions, and thus start thinking and learning about the problem from a different point of view. Hence, a better approach is to give them a series of business constraints (time to market, the demands of carriers, the fact that most end users prefer to buy subsidized phones with 1-2 year lock-in contracts, the intransigence of suppliers, why a single company can’t afford to create their own chipsets from scratch and have to rely on companies like Broadcom, etc.) and then tell them — we’d love to delight our customers in any way we can, and clearly you are very passionate about DRM, open device drivers, and other OSS issues. We however have to create successful products and sell them at a price such that we don’t go out of business — can you help us work through all of these constraints? Let’s work together so we can make an open source mobile platform that meets the spirit as well as the legal requirements of the open source world!

Dr. Jaaksi and his team are struggling with a hard problem, and I am very sympathetic to their issues. And, they have to be commended for investing as much time and effort on the Maemo platform, as well as other Linux and Open Source platforms as they have to date. The strength of the Open Source community is that we work together to solve our mutual problems, while celebrating and giving permission to people to “scratch their own itches”. In order to do that, we need to learn how to better communicate with each other, and that is something that goes in both directions.

When I was at MIT as an undergraduate, far too many years ago than I care to admit, I took economics classes and Sloan School of Management classes (even though they were not necessary for a Computer Science degree) for that very reason. I encourage open source advocates to learn how to walk a mile or two in business people’s shoes, since if you want to influence them them to change in the ways that you desire, you need to know where they are coming from — just shouting and throwing rotten tomatoes generally won’t get you very far. On the flip side, people who are on the corporate side of the divide also need to understand that certain ways of engaging the community can be more productive than others. At the end of the day, hopefully we can all agree with Dr. Jaaksi that everyone will benefit if we all commit to learning from each other.

Update: I’ve fixed Dr. Jaaksi’s name so it is spelled correctly; my apologies for the error.

Jim Zemlin: Open Source PLUS Open Standards are a “Smart Business Decision” Says E.U.

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:55:54 +0000

The New York Times reports today a hard rebuke from European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, against Microsoft’s tactics in Europe. In her speech she offered up some advice worth heeding; “I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

Certainly when using any software this matters, but let’s take a closer look at how this advice relates to open source. Evaluate the following statement for accuracy. True or False? “[Open Source] severely limits the possibility of proprietary “lock-in”–where users become hostage to the software vendors whose products they buy.” If you answered “true,” you’re not alone. This was published recently in the MIT Business Review and is a commonly held belief by computing professionals everywhere. In fact, it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of open source technology. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding can prove costly and dangerous.

First let me be clear by stating that I am a sincere advocate for open source software. It is a superior development model which accelerates innovation, makes for superior peer reviewed code, increases competition and more. For some users having access to the source code of software allows them all the freedom they need. However, for many users the open source development process and its open code format do not guarantee the long term ability to easily or freely choose a technology solution. It’s only half the equation: If the cost of moving from one open source solution to another is prohibitive, you’re just as locked in to open source as a closed source solution. Only open source combined with open standards delivers freedom of choice. I would amend the E.U. commissioners statement to read, “choosing BOTH open source and open standards solutions is a very smart business decision indeed.”

Open standards are vitally important to ensure interoperability and reduce your risk as a technology user. A report titled “Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems” developed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard law school suggests that corporations and government policies should “mandate technology choice, not software development models.”

The report defines open standards, which it distinguishes from open source, based on six elements including the nature of its control, evolution, and availability. While propriety software can exist within an open standards environment, the combination of open source and open standards delivers the best choice for freedom from vendor lock-in. In fact, I would argue that the OSS development model combined with a strong, clear, and timely standard produces an autocatalytic environment of broad choice and participation – both working together to make the other stronger. The report states it like this:

“Open standards and open source share common ground. Both result from a community oriented, collaborative process in which anyone can contribute and access the end product — either standard specifications or source code. There is a complementary relationship with the implementation of an open standard in open source, which promulgates adoption of that standard.”

The report recommends “mandating interoperability in procurement language, preferring open standards when applicable and adhering to the principles of openness whenever possible.” It also provides an example of how the government of Japan has developed software procurement guidelines that dictate that open standards and open document formats shall be given priority in government contracts.

Fortunately, there are many open standards implemented in leading open source products (Apache and HTTP for instance). For Linux users there is a widely supported open standard that forms the foundation of most Linux distributions. The Linux Standard Base offers corporate IT a no-cost solution that delivers freedom of choice. So why exactly should you care about Linux standards?

Improved Interoperability. By following the LSB, distribution vendors and ISVs improve portability between applications and compliant operating systems. It also enables end users to choose the distribution that best meets their needs.

Reduced Risk. The more your organization deploys and supports open standards, the less dependent you are on any one vendor. The Linux Standard Base – or any open standard with similar support – is a simple and effective risk management strategy.

Improved Functionality and Choice. Open standards will make it easier for ISVs to port their software to the Linux operating system. This will increase the number and type of applications available for the platform.

So How Do You Take Advantage of Linux Open Standards?

For IT users of Linux, it’s very easy to support open standards for Linux or any other technology. You should simply mandate open standards-compliance into your procurement contracts with your software vendors and ISVs. Many organizations have already done this with the Linux Standard Base. By stipulating this compliance in your contracts, you’ll ensure a degree of portability unparalleled by Windows and other systems ; either closed or open (think OpenSolaris).

You can also join standards organizations such as the Linux Foundation, the Open Group or OASIS and give your feedback directly to consortia members. This will enhance existing standards and make sure your concerns are addressed in the future. Furthermore, for any custom development your organization does, you should follow leading standards and best-practices to reduce your support and training costs and guarantee you can deploy your application on the platform of your choice.

Developing standards hand in hand in the wild and woolly world of open source is no easy task. The LSB project continues to develop and has not even come close to its full potential. However, I hope it’s clear how important open standards are to the success of your Linux strategy. Without them, as Commissioner Kroes points out, you – and your organization – may be in for a costly awakening.

Jim Zemlin: The Next Frontier for Open Source

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:06:57 +0000

Open Source is still a disruptive idea. It has moved beyond that in server operating systems, of course, with Linux on 20% of servers shipped these days. That’s known as being “mainstream.” But the effects of open source development and business models continue to be heavily disruptive as they spread into new technology markets. Disruption often benefits consumers directly.

Cell phones are the next device that will move to open standards. Whether the big providers like it or not.

Can you remember doing business before there were cell phones? Neither can I. It’s one of those technologies that became truly indispensable. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7432915/) Indispensable but not invincible. Quality of service is somewhere near early-adopter stage even after over 15 years of mass adoption. Intentionally obtuse billing. And from a technology standpoint, there’s vendor lock-in, monopolistic advantages, and a resistance to new disruptive technologies. Still, being able to do a phone call from virtually anywhere is extremely valuable, so the consumers put up with a lot.

If you can do phone calls from anywhere you should be able to do computing from anywhere. Reading email, browsing the web… you’ve become dependent on those apps at your desk. In the rest of the world, you’re used to it on your phone now, too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_mobile_phone_culture) In the US, the cell phone carriers and manufactures misguided attempt to control everything has left consumers short and arguably not served their shareholders as well.

Open source is about to hit the cell phone industry hard. It may even take with it one of the early darlings of US smart phones — a halfway station to open cell phone technology — the iPhone. Apple will be announcing the results of opening up the iPhone to third party developers next week at Apple’s WWDC 08. But the iPhone SDK is accessible only to existing Mac developers. That’s not open enough. ABI Research is estimating that somewhere near one quarter of the world’s smartphones will be Linux-based in 5 years. (http://www.abiresearch.com/abiprdisplay.jsp?pressid=1109) This is the iPhone’s real competition: Linux.

Where Linux goes, the consumer wins.

Amanda McPherson: Is Linux a Lonely Word?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:53:07 +0000

Yesterday as I was sitting in a cafe having a drink, I caught up on my New York Times business section. In a review of the new class of Mini-Notebooks, I wasn’t surprised to see Linux mentioned. After all Linux is the dominant OS in these new class of computers, described by the Times as bigger than a smart phone but smaller than a laptop. While I wasn’t surprised to see Linux mentioned, I was surprised by my reaction.

Just last year I would have leaped out of my chair (spilling my drink) and shouted to uninterested cafe neighbors, “Hey, look! The New York Times is writing about Linux on the desktop!” I’m used to reading about Linux in server applications. The New York Stock Exchange for instance. But until recently, Linux on the desktop was relegated to the technologist’s ghetto. If you didn’t love the command line and compiling your own code, you would never have even tried it. Lucky for them, it’s becoming so common that I just nodded, pleased with the advancement of Linux in this new realm and went forward with my evening. (I should point out however that most of those uninterested neighbors sat rapt behind Apple notebooks. Still a long way to go.)

Today, more news on the Linux mini-top front. PC World writes that “Acer sees Linux as key to Low-cost laptops.”

“We really need to continue our journey on Linux,” said Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president at Acer, in an interview. “We can develop it more and we will try to develop alliances with more partners. Linux is a lonely word. We need to try to create a community,” he added.

Linux is a lonely word? Didn’t we just publish a paper that showed that over 1,000 different developers contributed to the last kernel release? Hardly a lonely place. (If you really want lots of room there are a few other open source OS projects you could try.)

All kidding aside, I think Mr. Wong is correct. He means for vendors shipping Linux on their desktop it is a lonely place. There isn’t the Microsoft ecosystem. There isn’t the partner programs. It’s a different model. Luckily for everyone, that desktop vendor community is getting more crowded and more mature. We are trying our small part by enabling a meeting of the key desktop vendors and architects at our Linux Foundation Collaboration Summits. I’d like us to do more.

Why is Linux on these new classes of PCs seeing some success? Microsoft has created a whole new class of “Vista Orphans:” vendors who want to sell lower cost PCs and can’t afford the component costs required by Vista. Microsoft has responded by keeping “Coke Classic” around (Windows XP) as they see their market presence slipping in these new machines. And that’s really the key. As Glyn Moody says: “The price difference has been slight and there has always been the problem of learning new ways of working. The Asus Eee PC changes all that. Because the form factor is so different, people don’t seem to make direct comparisons with the desktop PC and so don’t expect the user experience to be the same.”

While those neighbors in the cafe sit behind Apple notebooks with all of those attendant expectations, a new form factor breaks the hold of those prejudices and preconceptions. It’s not really all about price of OS, since Microsoft can certainly — if pressured — drop the price on XP, New Coke or their next OS. As a community let’s focus on experience and making Linux on the desktop less lonely:

Acer is banking on Linux for a lot of its Aspire one sales. The mini-laptop only carries Linux right now, but a Windows XP version will be available by the time the laptop launches in early July, Wong said.

“But in our marketing, our main message to users is about Linux because the experience is more real, it is more vivid,” he said.