Ingres Christens Project Icebreaker (webpronews.com) [LWN.net]

webpronews.com covers the new Project Icebreaker from Ingres. "The open source database company Ingres teamed with another open source player to deliver Icebreaker, a way to place database services on a server with no operating system required. Ingres CTO Dave Dargo blogged about Icebreaker, which launched recently during the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo."

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No OS required?

Posted Sep 2, 2006 14:45 UTC (Sat) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link]

It seems they're exaggerating a little when they're bragging about "no OS required", but I think this is a very interesting development. I assume (not having read more than the article and the blog posting) they've bundled a stripped-down Linux or something similar with their database. If the included OS can indeed run on bare metal, it still has to worry about hardware drivers, which can get messy.

With everyone switching to virtual servers these days, this could alter the way servers are deployed - take a couple of servers, install a VMM such as Xen on each, and then install each service such as database, MTA, Web server etc. in its own virtual machine, together with the bundled special-purpose OS that you generally don't have to worry about. The OS becomes a commodity layer that can be included with applications when needed, just like common libraries.

In the future, software might be targeted for specific VMMs instead of OSs - think "Oracle for 32bit Xen". In this case the software only needs to have enough drivers to run on the virtual hardware the VMM provides. Will this render things like the LSB standardization effort obsolete? I doubt so, but it's conceivable.

However, it might be harder to integrate the systems for things like backups, logging or security updates.