We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

James Westby: Ubuntu Distributed Development

James gave a great overview of the Ubuntu distributed development project, which has the ambitious goal of providing a homogeneous view of all of the source code for Ubuntu packages using Launchpad and Bazaar. This includes modeling the relationships between the versions of the code in Debian and further upstream, which is complicated by the use of different revision control systems, patch systems, and so on.

At this stage, most of the source code for Ubuntu and Debian is available through the system, and developers can freely branch from it and request merges. It works the same way for all packages, so developers only need to learn one toolset and workflow. We hope that this will lower the barrier to entry for contributing to Ubuntu, as well as make it easier to share patches between Ubuntu, Debian and upstream.

Timo Hoenig: Extending the scope of mobile devices

Timo reviewed how mobile devices have evolved over the past 40 years, citing dramatic improvements in compute power, memory, bandwidth and so on, but comparatively small improvement in battery life (several orders of magnitude less). Thus, he sees power management and related technologies as important to the further advancement of the category. He specifically identified network links as a key consideration, as they consume a great deal of power, and have continued to do so with newer generations of technology. Local power management, he says, is not sufficient, and we need to take a network-aware view.

He introduced the concept of an “early bird” connector, which acts as a supervisor for a mobile device. It communicates with remote network nodes on its behalf, and takes decisions about when and whether to wake up the mobile device. He estimated a 12% power savings by offloading processing to such a device, using a simple model of power consumption. The early bird would run on another system on the network, presumably without the same power constraints (like a proxy server).

Sam Vilain: Linux Containers

Sam detailed the LXC implementation of containers for Linux. In contrast with vserver, it seems to offer a much simpler interface. Because of this, it has been comparatively straightforward to merge into the Linux kernel mainline.

LXC uses existing Linux kernel facilities to group processes within containers into control groups, which can then be used to control access and scheduling of resources (network, CPU, storage, etc.). Each resource type has a namespace similar in principle to what chroot() provides for filesystems. Since all of the hardware is visible to a single kernel, there can be a great deal of flexibility in how resources are allocated. For example, a given network device and CPU can be dedicated to a container.

Usefully for system administration and diagnostics, all of these resources can be directly accessed from the host without stopping or shutting down guests.