[cgl_discussion] Re: [dcl_discussion] ANNOUNCE: OSDL Clusters (foundational components)

[Mika Kukkonen]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 13:27, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
(...)
> please let me briefly voice my strong concern about starting yet another
> project for clustering. Linux already has many membership services etc;
> what would be needed is integration and shepherding and standard APIs,
> not another implementation! 

I find it always ironic, when people in complain about new Open Source
projects that happen to compete with existing Open Source projects. One
of the "advertised" strengths of Open Source is (supposed to be) in the
survival of fittest manifested by competing projects. For example I
wonder if Apache would be as good as it is today without the n+1 other
Open Source web servers out there.

Having said that, I do agree that rei-inventing the wheel is not to be
done lightly. Rest assured, that our decision has been done after lot
of pain and deliberation of what is currently available in this space.
None of the existing _implementations_ implement the SAForum API's which
these projects are aiming for, nor are they at the level several of our
sponsors hope this kind of services should be.

> That is not a good use of engineering resources.

You are free to have that opinion.

> Are you proposing to supplement one of these, or do you really, really
> want to start one from scratch?!

In case of cluster communication (aka TIPC), we are definititely not
starting from scratch. It has been the opinion here, that building the
other two services on top of TIPC should be doable with reasonable work
amount.

> There are also reasonably strong reasons arguing against implementing
> these in kernel space. I'm sure you have heard the summary of them:
> Maintenance, mainline / vendor acceptance etc.

Through our initiatives we have heard opinion of people who are planning
to produce products using Linux clustering technology (i.e. people who
are potential customers to the company you are working for ...), and
their opinion differs from yours.

> Could you please clarify the rationale?

As SUSE is a member of OSDL and it's initiatives, may I suggest that if
you want to hear rationale or even influence our decisions you start
participating in those?

> > the network.  Applications and other cluster services (checkpointing,
> > resource managegers, etc.) would simply subscribe to membership events.
> 
> Implementation for data checkpointing and some others actually already
> exist for Linux heartbeat, and all in user-space.

And we are not planning to implement these.

--MiKu