Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
If you need your data to be available in all your offices -- even if the central office goes up in smoke one day -- Radiant Data's new PeerFS 4.0, which now supports multiple 64-bit Linuxes, might be just what you need."
Posted Apr 6, 2007 16:50 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link] (19 responses)
> Pricing for PeerFS 4.0 ranges from $495 for a two-node "local"
So what we have here is advertisement for a commercial and expensive
Do Linux-Watch and LWN get money for publishing marketing fluff like this
Posted Apr 6, 2007 16:58 UTC (Fri)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (2 responses)
Some slow news days... content is content... especially for sites funded by Google Adsense. :)
In any event, did you know about PeerFS before this article? Fess up. It was news to me.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 22:16 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link] (1 responses)
I didn't know about PeerFS, and thought it was something new. And open sourcey. Both aren't true, so nothing left, is there? Not even interesting flamewars about mainline inclusion or exclusion. *sniffle*
Though the possible GPL violation crops up now, but such things are icky.
Quote from their whitepaper:
> The PeerFS client instance converts Linux VFS requests into
Slippery, sloppy slope, down, down, down!
Posted Apr 9, 2007 10:25 UTC (Mon)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link]
No, I wouldn't buy it, and I don't really like to use commercial apps on my Linux box, but LWN is not limited to open source news, AFAIK.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 17:01 UTC (Fri)
by mikov (guest, #33179)
[Link] (9 responses)
"PeerFS has delivered the ultra-high availability and data integrity we need with a bare minimum of administrative overhead. Moreover, Radiant Data has continuously improved the product to meet our stringent requirements."
The interesting questions are: is this an open source product ? If not, isn't it violating the GPL ? Unless it is using FUSE, an FS runs in the kernel, right ?
Posted Apr 6, 2007 17:35 UTC (Fri)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link] (7 responses)
I guess it's in the same legal state where the binary Nvidia and ATI drivers are.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 19:00 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (6 responses)
Not really. ATI and NVidia binary drivers are legal because binary part is clearly not derived work of Linux kernel (it contains code ported from Windows) and glue code is free. So it's clear that AMD and NVidia are not violating anything. It's not clear if what the Ubuntu is doing is allowed by GPL - but that other question. Now with PeerFS it's not really known if this FS is totally separable from Linux (like AFS) or is it deeply ingrated (like Ext3) - and that's quite a question because it determines if it's GPL violation or not. This question is not discussed in article at all...
Posted Apr 6, 2007 23:26 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (5 responses)
I think it's much more accurate to say that it's reasonable to assume that they are not violating it.
Posted Apr 7, 2007 17:55 UTC (Sat)
by mikov (guest, #33179)
[Link] (4 responses)
These are the things that I am curious about in regards to PeerFS:
- Are there any other closed-source kernel file systems for Linux ?
- Does PeerFS taint the kernel ? Even if we assume that it doesn't technically violate the GPL, a tainted kernel is not something I'd like to run.
This is the second instance in the last couple of months that I have came across products utilizing closed source Linux kernel code. The other instance is Virtuozzo which apparently has proprietary kernel modules providing functionality beyond OpenVZ.
Is this a growing trend ?
In both these cases it is assumed that the GPL is not violated, because the code in question cannot be examined. It seems to me that the logical assumption is exactly the opposite - that the GPL _is_ violated. Both companies should at least post detailed explanations on their websites of why it isn't.
Posted Apr 7, 2007 19:28 UTC (Sat)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link] (2 responses)
There was (or is?) a binary module for the mvfs used by ClearCase.
Posted Apr 8, 2007 2:02 UTC (Sun)
by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
[Link] (1 responses)
Although I switched jobs recently and am no longer using ClearCase, my understanding is that IBM (which bought Rational Software, which bought PureAtria, which was the combined company of Purify and Atria, which was the original vendor providing ClearCase) released the MVFS kernel module code under the GPL as of ClearCase 6.0, released last year or so.
Posted Apr 8, 2007 6:06 UTC (Sun)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
AFS is ancient, as old as X Windows or Kerberos. Part of that Athena project.
IBM released code for it and it has gone through tremendous improvements in terms of performance, code quality, and stability. Especially with newer releases.
But it's not under a GPL compatable license. Nobody can do anything about it since the original copyright owners are far gone and numerous. Still open source, though, and not a derivative of the kernel.
Posted Apr 7, 2007 22:38 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
They use software that was developed for a different operating system first, then adopted to be used in a Linux module. Any code that they have that is 'linux derived' is in GPL form.
So given my limited understanding about how the copyright works and how what is and what is not 'derived' is up to a judge to decide, and not the Linux devs, the GPL license, or FSF.. I'd have to guess that they are not violating the GPL.
But they could be. I am sure that if a Linux developer wanted to he could easily get a lawyer to take them to court over it. It's definately not cut and dry.
Now with this FS, I have no freaking clue. I know that I wouldn't touch a closed source FS with a ten foot pole if I could help it.
> Is this a growing trend ?
It's a cultural problem that I don't think that you'd realy be able solve with a license.
I'd bet good money that GPL violations are failing per thousand users or per hundred companies involved in Linux development. But I'd also bet that since Linux is growing in popularity, maturity, and usefullness and the overal competitive operating systems are dwindling that issues with people trying to squeeze around GPL is _increasing_ in number.
So the critical thing is to avoid having a bad reputation placed on open soruce drivers for being inadiquete.
The major examples of this is wireless drivers for Linux. Linux developers dropped the ball early on with wireless drivers by treating them as just your normal everyday ethernet device with 'wireless extensions'.
This was a mistake and lead to having drivers that had mismatched and limited functionality. Made it much more difficult to develop drivers and drivers were generally not mature or stable.
So now you have people who realy beleive that it's impossible to have a Linux operating system running a modern laptop and not use any closed source software.
They beleive that unless you use closed source software your not going to have 3d support or only have very poor wireless support if any at all.
This is not true. But what is needed is a campaign of education on the part of major Linux vendors and distributions on _why_ users should avoid closed source drivers.
With examples and everything. How people had bugs that corrupted files, but they went away with removing a closed source drivers. How performance and stability was bad and there was nothing anybody can do about.
How you may have instability and issues with open source drivers, but they can be fixed and people are allowed to find out why things went bad.
With Redhat coming out and stating why they won't support closed source drivers. That not only it is a license violation most of the time, but that users you are stuck depending on closed source drivers have a worse experiance then those that don't.
That it's for the end user's own _self_interest_ to specificly seek out vendors and hardware that has proper Linux support and support manufacturers with healthy appreciation for end users and for Linux developers.
Stuff like that.
It's like that driver development kit for Linux. It was a success, but it was ment as sort of a joke. But people used it and liked it.
Or like how Linux developers advertising no-cost driver development for vendor's hardware like it was a special deal down at the hardware store. That is something that for you and I is obvious, but for other people they didn't realise. And that helped people get together with the Linux developers very well.
People have been using closed source software for years. They have assumptions and expectations. If they had good success with using closed source drivers for Windows then why would they expect any difference from Linux? They probably figure as long as the vendor is smart and pays attention to their issues that they have nothing to fear, right?
So education is a nice way to show that 'there is a better way'.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 22:28 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link]
Posted Apr 6, 2007 17:54 UTC (Fri)
by sbishop (guest, #33061)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Apr 6, 2007 22:02 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link]
Posted Apr 7, 2007 4:51 UTC (Sat)
by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 9, 2007 13:06 UTC (Mon)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
It seems he or she followed your instructions backwards in time.
Posted Apr 10, 2007 14:39 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 12, 2007 7:05 UTC (Thu)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link]
Posted Apr 6, 2007 19:20 UTC (Fri)
by danielpf (guest, #4723)
[Link]
Posted Apr 6, 2007 19:31 UTC (Fri)
by zooko (guest, #2589)
[Link] (6 responses)
Hopefully cook and ris will adjust in response to user feedback. Or maybe we could create an alternate news feed for only the more interesting items. Such a feed would of course have a lower frequency of update. Hm... In fact, if I just stopped loading lwn.net to check for new news and instead only looked at the weekly LWN releases, then I guess I would be happier...
Regards,
Zooko
P.S. I'm personally fascinated by the topic of distributed file systems, as it has been my primary focus in professional and open source work for many years. But somehow lightly masticated press releases are just rarely interesting.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 21:08 UTC (Fri)
by joib (subscriber, #8541)
[Link]
Interesting. So what's your take on Lustre vs. Panasas vs. pNFS vs. ceph vs. something else? Based on a quick look ceph looks interesting, but it seems there's momentum behind pNFS which is quite similar to Lustre and PanFS.
Anyway, once these mature and show good performance on metadata-intensive workloads, they might mean the end to all those gold-plated (and non-scalable) SAN arrays. woot..
Posted Apr 6, 2007 22:21 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link]
Posted Apr 6, 2007 22:53 UTC (Fri)
by mikov (guest, #33179)
[Link] (3 responses)
Seriously, I think that the strong negative reaction to some of the stories here (e.g. the 3GHz AMD yesterday) is uncalled for.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 23:18 UTC (Fri)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link] (2 responses)
Look, it's not the end of the world, but if they want people to take the front page (or the RSS) seriously, "articles" like this need to be rare, not common like now seems to happen. Besides, it's harder to find the interesting articles when they're hidden between garbage.
Posted Apr 6, 2007 23:34 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
This is one of those situations were you should listen to your mom when she said "If you don't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.". A email to the editor would be much more appropriate.
There isn't anything with this website that I've noticed that they should only concentrate on open source software, right? And it's very typical for any sort of periodical I've ever seen to mention product announcements and such things. I am sure that more then a couple subscribers would be interested in such a thing, even if it's just curiosity of what exactly this thing does.
Posted Apr 8, 2007 0:22 UTC (Sun)
by i3839 (guest, #31386)
[Link]
No it isn't, that only holds for when saying things about people. This is generating user feedback, doesn't hurt anyone (if the joking around about ris and cook isn't taken seriously anyway ;-).
Maybe, maybe not. But we'll never know if users don't give feedback, would we?
> Available since 2003 for 32-bit Linux systemsRadiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
> system to $1,995 per node for the Enterprise WAN edition.
product with just a new update. No information about replicating network
file systems, or comparisons between them, nothing interesting at all.
or something?
I hope LWN and Linux-Watch *ARE* getting some money for it... because they aren't getting a whole lot from you and I.Money for nothing and your chicks for free
I hope they do too, sort of. Or else it's a really sad case. I pay for LWN already, block GoogleAds globally (never click on them anyway and they slow down page loading sometimes), so I'd prefer they get their money from non-obfuscated advertisements.Money for nothing and your chicks for free
> PeerFS messages and forwards the messages to a server instance.
No matter if it is open source or not, it IS Linux news.Money for nothing and your chicks for free
I also thought the article wasn't good. Nothing technical in there at all just marketing crap. What is this:Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
is this an open source product ? If not, isn't it violating the GPL ?
Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
I wouldn't say that it's clear that they are not violating the GPL. They certainly can be. Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Are you talking about NVIDIA and ATI or PeerFS ?Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Are there any other closed-source kernel file systems for Linux ?
Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
MVFS existed for other UNIX systems including SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX for years before it was ported to Linux, so although it was not GPL'd originally it's reasonable to assume it is not a derivative work for the same reasons the video drivers discussed above are not (if they are not). The glue bits were released as source code (to be honest I can't remember the license) just as with other binary modules.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
You have a similar issue with OpenAFS.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
I was talking about the Nvidia/ATI driver. Mostly the Nvidia driver.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Closed source, as far as I could figure out without downloading their trial version. Only runs on one i386 version of REdHat and one i386 versio nof Suse anyway, should tell enough. And not using FUSE but directly hooked into the VFS. The lack of technical information on their webpage is appaling.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
No kidding. What about "Getting Familiar with GCC parameters"? From LWN Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
I'd expect to hear from GCC developers about new optimization strategies
(for instance), instead of getting a link to a GCC newbies guide.
Yes, that one was rather disappointing too, but at least it wasn't adverticement.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
I actually found that article to be informative, so please speak for yourself.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
"I'd expect..." Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Well, both are useful. There's no reason why LWN should be *only* for Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
experts. We all were newbies once.
Besides, it spawned a nice comment thread. (...In fact, now that I think about it, I didn't even bother clicking the article, just went straight to the comments. Peer production for the win.)Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
For those looking for alternative free distributed file systems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_file_systemDistributed file systems
You'll soon learn to look at the name of the poster of LWN news items. "cook" and "ris" tend to post items which are not as interesting or as topical as the ones we got used to when "corbet" was the only poster.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
I'm personally fascinated by the topic of distributed file systems, as it has been my primary focus in professional and open source work for many years.
Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
You're suggesting cook and ris are being bribed? I wouldn't dare to go that far, but if it's really true, it would be horrible!Ohw noh
I am almost absolutely sure (about 0.01%) that "cook" and "ris" are pseudonims which "corbet" uses when he has to post a story which isn't that interesting :-)Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
It depends whether they give false hope for interesting and relevant content or not. The 3GHz AMD is about hardware, which isn't really LWN's focus, and this one is about a costly closed source one out of a better handful. Both aren't much more than advertisement, but they're posted as articles.Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
You realise that your getting upset over a single sentence, right?Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)
Yes I am. But I followed the link and over all invested too much time into it to leave without getting anything out of it, so what else could I've done? At least now we've some discussion going on, and LWN gets some user feedback. First we had only an uninteresting one line advertisement, so I consider it an improvement...Radiant Data launches 64-bit Linux HA replicating file system (Linux-Watch)