Working Groups

High Availability

As befits the importance of this capability, several proprietary and open source projects have been created. These projects were created independantly for different reasons, most notably that they were originally running on a single specific platform.

However, this has changed. Many of these projects have been ported to Linux by now, and some proprietary ones even been made open source in the process.

Much of this capability is part of the infrastructure an operating system platform provides. While all of the solutions can be divided into components which provide basically the same functionality - though optimised for specific applications - the interfaces are quite widly different, making it hard to implement an application requiring cluster services portably across this infrastructure.

The Linux HA working group session's main focus this year will be to work on defining a path to an Open Clustering Framework which will allow us to overcome these difficulties.

This will allow the developers to implement their applications in a portable manner, while allowing the different open source projects and vendors to focus on their specific area of expertise.

The first steps of this process are:

A) Agree on the main goals of such a clustering framework.

A very well thought out proposal is Alan Robertson's paper "An Open Framework for Clustering" (http://www.linux-ha.org/framework/). B) Agree on the further steps necessary to achieve these goals. Obvious steps are:

1. Assess currently avaible solutions for their viability under these goals.
2. Identify components. Functionality provided, features, scope, communication paths
   between components etc.
   (Components which readily come to mind are membership services, reset services, distributed lock managers, application plugins for switch over clustering, group communication services etc)
3. Design APIs.
4. Agree on the above.
5. Figure out how to rework the current situation into components of this framework. Which parts can be reused, what has to be reimplemented or even written from scratch.
6. Implement the ideas above.
7. World domination.

A proposal would be that we create an active discussion on the linux-cluster mailing list and that we adopt the RFC model for papers, ideas, proposals and of course API and protocol definitions and form a permanent working group.

Four months after OLS at Linux Kongress 2001 in Enschede/Netherlands, we have the opportunity to meet again for a 3 day working group session and discuss our findings in detail. (This is step 4 in the above list ;-) It is felt that 4 months is a good time for this follow-up meeting.

In Enschede, we will have enough time to discuss different proposals and agree on how to proceed further.

We will use the first half of the session to present the above in more detail, and spend the second half in a heated discussion.

If you are interested in presenting your thoughts on the above three points, please contact Lars Marowsky-Bree .

You should attend if developing for clusters of any kind is of at any interest to you. Your input is appreciated.

Memory Management