It was funny … at the beginning of this session was the first time
that I paid any attention to the first slide … the Novell “one Net”
vision slide. I hadn’t really heard it yesterday … this time it
was with a German accent so I took notice.
The vision of Suse, is to build one universal operating system for all
platforms. This is not so far from the original NT vision at
Microsoft … cross-processor OS. I remember when I was
consulting and we tested and installed NT on Intel, Alpha, MIPS and
other RISC processors … I thought it would be impressive. In
the end, only the Intel platform survived. There was no real
market for the more expensive RISC machines.
The presenter touched on UNIX history, and the fact that POSIX
compliance really drove forward levels of interoperability. SuSE,
he says, is the first to then take this even further with one source
code base across 32/54 bit processors, and all platforms.
He also indicated that their AutoBuild process builds, certifies, and
tests the various “flavors”.
It’s weird, but this part on the build environment of SuSE is going on
and on. People are leaving … it’s like the presentation could
have been called “This is how we build SuSE products”. I’m going
to stay a little longer to see where this goes …. I thought I would
hear about features, etc.
He finally moved on to YaST and the power of the feature set.
Security was next … network monitoring, file system monitoring,
encrypted file system, ACLs, 128-bit SSL, etc. High-availability
also.
Scalability was next … CPU-scaling via 64-bit processors and 64-way
SMP. Storage scaling via Multi-path I/O, 1024 NAS-based file
systems, more disk (up to 2,000 devices for 292TB). Application
scalaing by upping the total memory supported.
Other things … Logical Volume Manager, Journaling File Systems, more Open Source packages.
What’s coming?
- Kernel 2.6
- Multinode failover
- CGL 2.0 (Priority 1 features)
- Redundant Scalable paths to storage
- HD mirroring
- Cluster file system
- Cluster volume manager
- Improved performance of large machines
- SMP, RAM, I/O
- Native POSIX Thread Library
- Restructured I/O Subsystem
- Up to 128 CPUs per system
- More efficient large RAM and NUMA system support
- Hotplug and Persisitent device names (sysfs, udev)
There were also various security additions, adding a CA, new GUI admin interfaces, etc. They commented on using OpenSLP.
Now he’s flipping through slides like crazy …OpenExchange has a lot
of improvements, but I couldn’t really keep up. On the Desktop
there is a push for other application compatibility, single sign-on,
and some SAP integration. More hardware support – biometric
devices, mobile power management, and thin-client support. Lots
of Desktop lock-down features.