2.2. The story so far

2.2.1. Historical Development

Rumours say that Mosix comes from Moshe Unix. Initially Mosix started out as an application running on BSD/OS 3.0.

Announcing MO6 for BSD/OS 3.0 Oren Laadan ([email protected]) Tue, 9 Sep 1997 19:50:12 +0300 (IDT) Hi: We are pleased to announce the availability of MO6 Version 3.0 Release 1.04 (beta-4) - compatible with BSD/OS 3.0, patch level K300-001 through M300-029. MO6 is a 6 processor version of the MOSIX multicomputer enhancements of BSD/OS for a PC Cluster. If you have 2 to 6 PC's connected by a LAN, you can experience truly multi-computing environment by using the MO6 enhancements. The MO6 Distribution -------------------- MO6 is available either in "source" or "binary" distribution. It is installed as a patch to BSD/OS, using an interactive installation script. MO6 is available at http://www.cnds.jhu.edu/mirrors/mosix/ or at our site: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/mosix/ Main highlights of the current release: -------------------------------------- - Memory ushering (depletion prevention) by process migration. - Improved installation procedure. - Enhanced migration control. - Improved administration tools. - More user utilities. - More documentation and new man pages. - Dynamic configurations. Please send feedback and comments to [email protected]. -------------------

GNU/Linux was chosen as a development platform for the 7th incarnation in 1999. Early 1999 Mosix M06 Beta was released for Linux 2.2.1 At the end of 2001 and early 2002 openMosix, the open version of Mosix was born (more in the next paragraph).

2.2.2. openMosix

openMosix is in addition to whatever you find at mosix.org and in full appreciation and respect for Prof. Barak's leadership in the outstanding Mosix project.

Moshe Bar has been involved for a number of years with the Mosix project (www.mosix.com) and was co-project manager of the Mosix project and general manager of the commercial Mosix company.

After a difference of opinions on the commercial future of Mosix, he has started a new clustering company - Qlusters, Inc. - and Prof. Barak has decided not to participate for the moment in this venture (although he did seriously consider joining) and held long running negotiations with investors. It appears that Mosix is not any longer supported openly as a GPL project. Because there is a significant user base out there (about 1000 installations world-wide), Moshe Bar has decided to continue the development and support of the Mosix project under a new name: openMosix and under the full GPL2 license. Whatever code in openMosix comes from the old Mosix project is Copyright 2002 by Amnon Barak. All the new code is Copyright 2002 by Moshe Bar.

There could (and will) be significant changes in the architecture of the future openMosix versions. New concepts about auto-configuration, node-discovery and new user-land tools are being discussed in the openMosix mailing lists. Most of these new functionalities are already implemented while some of them, such as DSM (Distributed Shared Memory) are still being worked on at the moment I write this (march 2003).

To approach standardization and future compatibility the proc-interface has changed from /proc/mosix to /proc/hpc and the /etc/mosix.map was changed to /etc/hpc.map. More recently the standard for the config file has been set to be located in /etc/openmosix.map (this is in fact the first config file the /etc/init.d/openmosix script will look for). Adapted command-line user-space tools for openMosix are already available on the web-page of the project.

The openmosix.map config file can be replaced with a node-auto-discovery system which is called omdiscd (openMosix auto DISCovery Daemon) about which we will discuss later.

openMosix is supported by various competent people (see openmosix.sourceforge.net) working together around the world. The main goal of the project is to create a standardized clustering-environment for all kinds of HPC-applications.

openMosix has also a project web-page at http://openMosix.sourceforge.net with a CVS tree and mailing-lists for developers as well as users.

2.2.3. Current state

Like most active Open Source programs, openMosix's rate of change tends to outstrip the followers' ability to keep the documentation up to date.

As I write this part in February 2003 openMosix 2.4.20 is available and openMosix Userland Tools v0.2.4 are available, including the new autodiscovery tools.

For a more recent state of development please take a look at the openMosix website

2.2.4. Which applications work

It is almost impossible to give a list off all the applications that work with openMosix. The community however tries to keep track of the applications that migrate and the ones who don't.