Stories about: KVM

Everywhere you turn nowadays, another company is targeting the Small and Medium Business (SMB) marketplace. SMBs are growing, and represent a segment of the IT market that has not been fully exploited by many, including open source software vendors that boasted early successes with large enterprises.

Chris Mason has recently released Btrfs v0.10, which contains a number of interesting new features. In general, Btrfs has come a long way since LWN first wrote about it last June. Btrfs may, in some years, be the filesystem most of us are using - at least, for those of us who will still be using rotating storage then. So it bears watching.

Jonathan Corbet is an active kernel contributor, co-founder and president of Linux development community news site LWN.net, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. His renowned Kernel Report has been presented to audiences worldwide, and this year marks his fourth appearance at Linux.conf.au. Here, Corbet offers Computerworld readers a sneak peek at the major themes behind this year's Kernel Report.

The last time I had a Stratus server in the lab, it was the ftServer W Series 4300, back in January 2006. That was a Windows-based system, and discussions with Stratus about Linux distributions showed that although it had a Linux version, it was the company's own distribution, and not standard. For some Linux shops, this wasn't a problem, but for those looking to run specific applications and services -- such as Oracle Database -- that require a certified distribution, it was an obstacle.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux project has released version 8 of its operating system with a host of new features aimed at raising the bar over rival Ubuntu.

The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) was merged for the 2.6.23 kernel. One CFS feature which did not get in, though, was the group scheduling facility. Group scheduling makes the CFS fairness algorithm operate in a hierarchical fashion: processes are divided into groups, and, within each group, processes are scheduled fairly against one another. At the higher level, each group as a whole is given a fair share of the processor. The grouping of processes is done in user space in a highly flexible manner; the control groups (formerly "process containers") mechanism allows a management daemon to classify processes according to almost any policy.

The last time the founders of Qumranet began a start-up it ended with a $320 million exit. Now they are going after the virtualization market.

Citrix Systems' US$500 million acquisition of XenSource, along with VMware's massively successful IPO last week, has further legitimatized the hot virtualization space, but it may also be causing some disillusionment among the open-source community.

Virtualization is a hot data center technology that is capturing the attention of IT for its consolidation and cost saving potential. As was evidenced at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week, open source and Linux platforms are on the forefront of the trend. In fact, given licensing issues with proprietary software, the combination of inexpensive or free open-source software and virtualization platforms may be the most important vehicle to drive widespread Linux adoption in the data center. Here are seven need-to-know points when looking at open source virtualization technology.

Having secured mainstream acceptance, the Linux community now stands poised to take on its next challenge: complementing the operating system with the applications, data center technologies and edge devices desired by corporate customers.

Novell is upgrading its support for virtualized operating systems running under a Xen environment, with a bundle of virtualization drivers to be released next month.