BMC (Bare-Metal Container) is relased

[James Bottomley]

On Mon, 2016-12-19 at 19:04 +0900, Kuniyasu Suzaki wrote:
> From: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm at xmission.com>
> Subject: Re: BMC (Bare-Metal Container) is relased
> Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 18:46:03 +1300
> 
> > BMC is a very unfortunately name in your context as it typically
> > refers
> > to basboard management controller.
> 
> Yes, we know.
> We hope Bare-Metal Container grews up more famous than Baseboard
> Management Controller.
> 
> > Kuniyasu Suzaki <k.suzaki at aist.go.jp> writes:
> > > BMC can solve the container's (Docker's) problem which is caused
> > > by
> > > Linux kernel.
> > 
> > Which problem is that?
> 
> For exmaple, DPDK requires "igb_uio" and "rte_kni" kernel modules,
> but some kernels offered as a part of Linux Distribution do not
> include them.

That makes it a Distribution problem not a kernel problem, really. 
 Constainers is OS virtualization, so if the OS doesn't provide a
feature, it can't be virtualized.

The problem for those distributions is that the features you want
inside the container aren't available in bare metal instances either,
which means if they're really a need, the distro eventually provides
them or suffers in the market place.  This tends to force all distros
to supporting all useful features meaning the kernel configuration
problem is mostly a theoretical one.

> So, the container on these kernels can not run DPDK. Forthermore the
> normal setting of Transparet Huge Pages caused problems on some DB
> applications.

The THP problem might be more interesting, but your paper mentions it
in passing as hearsay (cloudera said this about RHEL 6.2) ... is there
any more recent data about it (RHEL 6.2 is 2.6.32 based, which is now a
seven year old kernel)?

James

> BMC try to apply suitable Linux kernel for a container image.
> These cases are reported on my paper published at IEEE Conference on
> High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) 2016.
> The paper and slide are downloadable.
>    Paper PDF: 
> https://staff.aist.go.jp/k.suzaki/HPCC16-BareMetalContainer.pdf
>    Slide PDF: http://www.slideshare.net/suzaki/baremetal-container-pr
> esented-at-hpcc2016
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> ------
> Kuni Suzaki
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