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Xen Project To Support ARMv8
Xen Project will release the Xen 4.3 hypervisor later today with support for ARMv7 and ARMv8 hardware.
The Xen Project overseen by The Linux Foundation produces an open source hypervisor that is a popular alternative to KVM. The project will release the Xen 4.3 hypervisor today with support for ARM servers, performance improvements and a technology preview of Open Vswitch.
The Xen Project is backed by a number of big firms including AMD, Cisco, Google, Intel and Samsung, and is one of the first hypervisors to support ARMv8 based processors along with the ARMv7 architecture. The Xen Project said it has been working with ARM server vendor Calxeda to validate Xen 4.3 on its ARMv7 and ARMv8 servers.
For the Xen Project, ARM server support, in particular ARMv8 support, will be key as servers using the architecture start to appear later this year and in volume during 2014. Given that Amazon Web Services, arguably the biggest cloud service provider around, is supporting the Xen Project, ARMv8 support in the hypervisor could be painful for VMware as it tries to compete against a free, industry supported alternative.
Lars Kurth, community manager for the Xen Project said, “The ARM server support is an exciting development for the community and we’re excited about the opportunities this will bring to customers.”
Xen 4.3 also includes improvements to power efficiency by using the MWAIT extension for processors such as Intel’s Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell.
Linux Foundation VP and COO Mike Woster talked up the importance of virtualisation to the Linux and open source community. He said, “Virtualization is important to Linux and the open source community and the Xen Project is helping companies realize new levels of scalability and efficiency in areas such as cloud computing.
“With the latest release of Xen Project, organizations can advance their cloud computing strategies to deliver on customer expectations for their enterprise environments.”
The Xen 4.3 hypervisor was released yesterday.
openSUSE Lacks Resources For ARM
Opensuse said that its ARM development is being limited by a lack of resources to build software despite having launched its Open Build Service (OBS).
Last month the Opensuse project announced the release of Opensuse 12.3, which brought ARM support to the same level as x86 and AMD64. While the project is working on bringing ARMv7 and more importantly ARMv8 support to its Linux distribution, Jos Poortvliet, community manager at Opensuse, said that the project’s ARM development has been limited by the lack of build resources.
Opensuse announced a collaboration with Samsung to create the OBS, which it was hoped would speed up the development life-cycle. However Poortvliet said, “ARM development is limited by available build resources required for compiling each iteration of new software and while the OBS helps by bringing a lot of build power in one place, the use of QEMU meant that build resources were shared with native x86_64 builds, which turned out to be a performance limitation.
“With fast and dedicated ARM hardware we can reserve build power for ARM builds and make use of the more efficient KVM virtualization.”
However in better news, Poortvliet said that the project had managed to deploy KVM – the Linux kernel based virtual machine – on ARM hardware. He added that parent firm Suse has assigned more resources to building ARM software on OBS and forecast that all packages would be built in two weeks.
While Canonical and Red Hat have been vocal about their ARM developments, Suse and its Opensuse project have been quietly going about their business, though given Poortvliet’s comments regarding a lack of resources, perhaps they have been going about it too quietly.
Although ARM vendors are not expected to converge on the server market until next year, even ARM thinks that most servers using its chips will run open source software.
Unless Suse manages to get its act together, it might find that Canonical and Red Hat have already carved out a significant chunk of the market.
Is Ubuntu Linux Spyware?
Richard Stallman has asked a South American free software association not to promote Ubuntu Linux at its events because it “spies on its users” by collecting its users’ desktop search activity and selling the data to Amazon.
Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 last October with Amazon search integrated into its Dash desktop search function.
Although Ubuntu users can opt out and Canonical claims it anonymises users’ search information before sending it to Amazon, the change resulted in Ubuntu users being shown Amazon ads in response to desktop search queries.
The ‘feature’ has attracted a lot of criticism and might have led some users to defect to other Linux distributions.
When Stallman’s request was denied by the FLISOL event organiser with the excuse that it would limit user freedom of choice, Stallman fired off a response to the organisation’s entire mailing list on Sunday. Parts of his email are quoted below, as translated by Groklaw.
“The issue I raise is about what should happen at FLISOL events. Give away copies of Ubuntu or not? Promote Ubuntu or no? I asked the organisers of the event that they, as a policy, not distribute or promote Ubuntu.
“Freedom of users is something else, and there isn’t a conflict between a user’s freedom and my request. If someone decides to install Ubuntu, I would consider it a mistake, but it’s his own choice to do it. What I ask is that you don’t participate, help or suggest that he do it. I didn’t request that you block him from doing so.
“As a matter of principle, I don’t believe anyone has a right, morally, to distribute proprietary software, that is, software that deprives the users of freedom. When the user controls his own software, he can install what he wants and no one can stop him. But today’s issue isn’t about him, what he does, but rather what you do with him.”
As Stallman sent his email only yesterday, it’s not yet known whether FLISOL has reconsidered promoting Ubuntu at its free software events.
These points might seem like splitting hairs, but apparently Richard Stallman – the author of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), as well as the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation – is serious about them.
RedHat Takes A Fall
Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.
Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.
Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm’s earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, “This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter’s EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs.”
Red Hat’s $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.