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Mosix now GPLed 55

Posted by Hemos from the open-to-the-world dept.
Az0th writes "Prof. Amnon Barak posted today to the Mosix list an announcement that the Mosix distribution is now under GPL. See the story for details. "
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Mosix now GPLed More

Mosix now GPLed

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  • Re:Who cares - it's out now (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I hope, of course, that you saw my sarcasm ;-) It is weird though, that people accuse Apple of being such mean people but without second thought accept other people open sourcing their code. Of course, that's probably due to Apple being a closed company previously. The criticism did help, though, the problems in the APSL were fixed. eh..

    tsu@home.com

  • Re:Mosix and IDF (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This would not surprise me one bit. It is rather difficult for Israel to get supercomputer class machines because of US hardware export regulations. They simply innovated around the problem ;)

  • Re:Who cares - it's out now (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    People were upset that Apple released stuff we mostly already had (with a license they could terminate! - just like all the other good projects they've killed) and held back all the apparently-doomed NeXT tech we're actually interested in.
  • I don't care about Mosix on BSD/OS. I want the FreeBSD core team to take a whack at porting it :) It should be that hard, and even if it is, its a pretty cool feature to have to make it worth working on :)
  • IIRC, MOSIX was first written for BSD/I. Any word about that version being released to the public? I'd like MOSIX between my Linux and FreeBSD boxes if possible :)

    tugrul
  • Well, MOSIx was actually developed first for the PDP-11 in 1982.
  • Men, this is a very important event. Mosix is the Right Thing (tm) and now it has the right license. Life is good. Slackware 3.6 and Mosix source code under GPL. My faith in Humanity just doubled.
  • Ive been lurking on the mosix mailing list for a couple of months and I must say its really low traffic. Its not the place where such discussions go.
  • From what I've heard (and i never saw the article),
    MOSIX was kept closed becaused it was used by the Israeli army, IDF.
    I may be a bit biased, but i prefer my nation security to GNU.


    ---
  • Ah! Its time for the traditional quote:- `If a man places security over freedom he looses both.'
    In any case, all the existing nuclear devices were developed on the computational equivalent of todays graphical calculators. Well - maybe not quite, but any nation could probably get sufficient computational power to create a bomb. A depressing or optimistic reflection of the world? Thats up to you to judge.

  • BTW (Score:1)

    by Lennie ( 16154 )
    btw, I hope this is gonna be part of the standard kernel, someday,
    that would be kewl.
  • This is sooo great... thanx isrealies...
    the best thing you guys ever did...!

    Linux kicks ass ;)

    mirror:
    http://www.wirehub.nl/~leen/MOSIX-0.91.tar.gz
  • What I'm wondering is how enthusiastically the developers are making this release. If I understand their previous dilemma correctly, the MOSIX package was basically something they could not do anything with (outside of their own internal use) without running smack into the GPL. Given the lack of ballyhoo on the site, it doesn't appear anyone at Hebrew is very happy about the tarball being online (done with sort of a "better than nothing" acerbity).

    Anyone have the MOSIX-list posting available? That should have been insightful . . . .

    (Of course, as another poster has mentioned, everything is now in place to show 'em how just good going GPL can be. Hopefully this can happen for more good software in the future)
  • They've released it which is what matters. I don't much care what their reasons are, but I'd like to think they've woken up to the new world order.

    All I've got to do now is figure out what to do with it :)

    Vik :v)
  • Can you do a cluster of clusters? Ok, that's the simple question. The hard question is can you do it in the fashin in which each cluster is a diffrent architecture?
    "Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
  • BSD/OS source comes with the package. It's not 'Open Source' but it's not like SCO either :)
  • The kind of problems which a bomb designer would have to solve are the high-math problems which the older parallel processing tools are designed for. I don't think withholding MOSIX would have slowed down anyone doing such calculations. MOSIX is a more general purpose tool which will be finding many interesting small applications.

    For that matter, the Linux Distributed IPC (DIPC) [cei.net] package was written by an someone from Iran, so open source parallel processing contributions are flowing in many directions already. And DIPC already has distributed shared memory, which MOSIX needs...maybe that will flow together.

  • If a job takes 24 hours, to use PVM or some other parallel processing system you have to break the algorithm up and alter the program.

    If the job takes 24 hours, but consists of a long pipe of filters, MOSIX should be able to run each filter on various processors and pipe the output between them. This is the benefit of MOSIX, of being able to use normal UNIX tools in parallel without alteration. (Of course, if one filter grinds for 23 hours before producing any output then you have a different problem...)

  • Not being able to access the site, Has the code actually been published? Or are they promising to do that?

    Flying blind...
    RB
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • MOSIX will let you reuse legacy code and distribute it on a processor farm so if you have many jobs of a type to run this will kick your throughput through the roof.

    Latency, on the other hand, will stay the same with MOSIX because you're still running a serial piece of code from who-knows-when. If you want a single 24 hour job to finish faster, you still have to use MPI or PVM or (...) to farm it on several machines. But if it's several long-term jobs that you just want running at a good pace,
    MOSIX is excellent.
  • I wouldn't jump to the "greedy bastards" conclusion so readily. After all, it's an educational institution that's developing this thing in the first place. The only greed that universities exhibit is during registration.

    It probably took them this long to cut through the red tape. Apparrently, the Israeli military was involved in funding the project, and they most likely wanted assurances it couldn't be used to build The Islam-a-Bomb.
  • If linux had been under a BSD license, they would not have released the sourcecode (at least, in the foreseeable future - it has taken them a few weeks to decide to go GPL). This is a fine example of how the GPL benefits the movement.

    I suspect with time it will also be a fine example of how free software will add to the project, since there will no doubt be a high level of interest in its clustering capabilities.


    __// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains

  • Sorry ... its got nothing to do with the include files.

    They originally tried to release a binary-only module, with GPL'd modifications to the kernel source to 'hook in' that module (yes believe it or not that is a violation of the GPL, there is currently an exception granted by Linus for certain drivers which do not change the driver interface - only his exception clause allows this to be done legally).

    However, this was in violation of the GPL and they were not able to release anything, until it was resolved - thankfully by changing the entire license.


    __// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
  • #!/usr/local/bin/perl5
    # 'cuz debian ships a cruddy 5.004
    use Rant::Soapbox;
    my $post = new Rant::Soapbox;
    $post->content( <<END );
    After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.

    MOSIX is a very valuable contribution to free software and quite a few people, raving license lunatics especially, ought to say a silent (or vocal!) "thank you."

    More software is a good thing. More free software is a very good thing. Rabid lunatic license paranoia is a bad thing.
    END
    warn "./ probably ate the last post due to entity translation.\n";
    $post->send_without_preview || die "I hate when posting doesn't work.\n";

  • Programs do not have to be designed for MOSIX to benefit from it.
    An obvious example is make. If you tell make to run several compiles in parallel, an SMP or MOSIX cluster will run those compiles on several processors at the same time. You can't do that on a Beowulf cluster without making a Beowulf version of the compiler. (Yes, I am aware that a compiler will want to do a lot of I/O to include files and libraries...)
  • Yes. It's mentioned in the (limited) documentation. In particular for dealing with varying architectures.
  • I wonder how they got around the Israeli government's export restrictions? My understanding was that *this* was the main reason MOSIX wasn't GPLed in the first place.
    That and fears that China or some other potentially threatening country would get a hold of it to model nukes (cheap supercomputer). When I talked to Dr. Barak several months ago about porting it from BSD to Linux, he said they were adamant about not releasing it. I told him it would happen one way or another.

  • Re:Well, kinda.. Re:ARRRRGH! It's /.'ed already! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 16, 1999 @08:22PM (#1889113)
    Hmm, not sure if I want to do this...
    Picked it up earlier today, before I found out it was news!

    A mirror of the source is on http://dougal.chu.cam.ac.uk/mosix/ [cam.ac.uk]

  • Re:Someone owes them... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 16, 1999 @09:25PM (#1889114)
    After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.

    Not at all. Had we not done all that bitching, MOSIX probably would not have been GPLed. We do owe them a congratulations and a thank-you, now that they've done the right thing (and I know I'll be e-mailing them both).

    Once again, the 'viral' GPL proves its worth in bringing us great source code. This will help the MOSIX project too -- the more people able to see/use/improve this source code, the better this type of clustering on Linux will get (and the greater the fame of the Hebrew University as its developers/maintainers). Once Redhat starts selling MOSIX/Linux distros, cheap clustering will be available for anyone, and it will be another nail in the coffin for NT.

    I wonder how they got around the Israeli government's export restrictions? My understanding was that *this* was the main reason MOSIX wasn't GPLed in the first place.

    A (formerly) bitchin' AC

  • The good guys vs. the bad guys (Score:3)

    by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Monday May 17, 1999 @09:07AM (#1889115) Homepage
    Some /.'ers seems to think about people or companies in terms of "good" or "bad". Other ./'ers don't think of people or companies that way, instead they think of _behaviours_ as good or bad.

    When people or companies like Linus or Microsoft are consistently behaving good or bad, this distinction doesn't cause any problems.

    However, as Cowards Anonymous demonstrated, when someone _change_ behaviour, this cause some confusion. For CA, the new "good" behaviour proves that the Mosix people where "good" all along, and therefore think an apology from the people who complained about the previous "bad" behaviour is appropriate. However, no such apology is to be expected, because the new "good" behaviour doesn't affect the status of the old "bad" behaviour.

    This is the same problem some people got when Troll Tech changed to an Open Source(TM) complaint license.

    To be honest, I think the tendency to divide people (and companies) into good or bad are a sign of immaturity. A world-view created by Hollywood. Companies in a market economy just tries to make money, and people tend to do what they believe are right. Judge behaviours instead.

  • Re:Easier than Beowulf? (Score:3)

    by axolotl ( 1659 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @09:58PM (#1889116) Homepage
    It's a different thing. MOSIX is effectively SMP over a network (yes I know it's not exactly the same, but hey.) whereas Beowulf is a message-passing system. The idea of Beowulf is to allow a single dataset to be worked on by processes running on several different machines, and applications have to be specially written. The upshot is, one application running fast.
    The idea of MOSIX is that you have one big kernel distributed over a lot of boxes (rather than SMP, which is just distributed over a lot of CPUs in one box). So a single thread can still only run on one CPU. But if you have lots of processes you want to run on one machine, or a heavily multithreaded process, then MOSIX is ideal.
    Of course, for lots of things you don't need either of these systems. If you can divide your data set up at the start of the task then 1/nth of the set can be processed on each single-processor machine. This is more or less how things like distributed.net work, with no need for MOSIX or Beowulf or PVM or any special system.

    axolotl

  • Re:WTHII (Score:3)

    by nstrug ( 1741 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @07:56PM (#1889117) Homepage
    Basically allows you to do process migration on a cluster. A Beowulf cluster (which we all know about) runs processes on each node which communicate by messaging. However, you can't treat the whole cluster as an SMP machine and simply start a process 'on the cluster' and hope it goes to the most suitable node. This is exactly what MOSIX does - it allows you to treat your cluster almost like a big, low bandwidth, SMP machine (AFAIK).

    Nick

  • looking for sponsors (Score:3)

    by michael ( 4716 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @08:37PM (#1889118) Homepage
    Just to inform you, they're still looking for sponsors for maintenance and further development (eg. network RAM). Hm, the great Linux distributions tend to spend money on stuff like that - would certainly be a good idea ....

  • There is a good howto (Score:3)

    by zzg ( 14390 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @11:56PM (#1889119)
    http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Parallel-Processi ng-HOWTO.html

    It goes trough a lot of the issues involved, hardware, suitable tasks and existing solutions.

  • simple mirror @ http://130.236.249.188/ (Score:3)

    by zzg ( 14390 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @08:55PM (#1889120)
    just the archive, no docs or anything

  • MOSIX (Score:3)

    by Dr. X ( 23464 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @07:41PM (#1889121)
    If you are considering building a cluster, I would highly recommend you check out MOSIX. I've used it in the past, and it works very well. The ability to migrate a running process from one box to another is just cool ;) I'm glad to see it's available once again and I can finally upgrade my kernel and still have MOSIX support.

  • Easier than Beowulf? (Score:3)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @08:23PM (#1889122) Homepage
    I am pretty much a Linux newbie, but from what i understand, a piece of software must be specifically written (or patched) in order to work effectively with Beowulf. Mosix seems to allow any process (regardless of how it was written) to effectively use the distributed resources of the system. IMO, this would make a MOSIX cluster easier to work with (from a coding standpoint). Is this correct, or am I reading things wrong?

  • What is it? (Score:5)

    by Omar Djabji ( 33756 ) on Sunday May 16, 1999 @07:17PM (#1889123)
    What is Mosix, you ask? From their web page:


    MOSIX is a software tool for supporting cluster computing. The core of MOSIX are
    kernel-level, adaptive load-balancing and memory ushering algorithms that are geared
    for maximal performance, overhead-free scalability and ease-of-use of a scalable
    computing cluster. These algorithms are designed to respond to variations in the
    resource usage among the nodes by migrating processes from one node to another,
    preemptively and transparently. MOSIX provides some SMP/NUMA functionalities in
    order to allow a cluster of PCs (workstations and servers) to work cooperatively as if
    part of a single system.


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